Four fossil dealers are charged with stealing $1M worth of dinosaur bones from public land in Utah and shipping them to China for profit

UPDATED: 17:29 EDT, 19 October 2023

• Feds charged fossil dealers Vint and Donna Wade and Steven and Jordan Willing

• Quartet allegedly pilfered protected dinosaur bones and sold them in China

• Some of the bones were converted into beads to manufacture jewelry

A quartet of fossil dealers have been charged with buying $1 million worth of dinosaur bones stolen from public lands in Utah and illegally shipping them to China for a profit.

An indictment announced on Thursday by federal prosecutors in Utah hit the four defendants with 13 felony counts for allegedly dealing in 150,000 pounds of stolen paleontological resources, including dinosaur bones.

Two Utah resident were charged in the case: Vint Wade, 65, and Donna Wade, 67, who together own Wade's Wood and Rocks in Moab.

Oregon resident Jordan Willing, 40, who is the founder and CEO of educational supply company Blue Marble, was also charged alongside his father, 67-year-old Steven Willing, a Los Angeles resident and Blue Marble executive.

The indictment alleges that the quartet conspired to purchase dinosaur bones from two unnamed, unindicted co-conspirators, who illegally excavated and removed them from public lands.

The four defendants are represented by different attorneys at separate law firms, all of whom declined to offer immediate comment when reached by DailyMail.com on Thursday afternoon.

Prosecutors say that in addition to selling over $1 million in looted dinosaur bones, the defendants caused over $3 million in damage with the scheme, including the lost commercial and scientific value of the bones, and the cost of restoration and repair.

Evidence photos shared by prosecutors showed bone fragments as well as jewelry labeled 'gembones' that appeared to be made from cut and polished dinosaur bones.

'By removing and processing these dinosaur bones to make consumer products for profit, tens of thousands of pounds of dinosaur bones have lost virtually all scientific value, leaving future generations unable to experience the science and wonder of these bones on federal land,' said US Attorney Trina A. Higgins.

'The United States Attorney's Office and our law enforcement partners are dedicated to protecting paleontological resources throughout the State of Utah,' she added. 'We will hold accountable anyone who seeks to engage in similar criminal conduct.'

According to the indictment, the Wades purchased the dinosaur bones from unindicted co-conspirators who had removed from federal land, and stockpiled them for resale to national vendors at gem and mineral shows.

Those sales include $1 million worth of bones bought by the Willings, who used their company to export them to China, mislabeling them and deflating their value to avoid US export bans, according to the indictment.

The indictment alleges that 'all parties knew or should have known that these paleontological resources were excavated, removed, sold, purchased, exchanged, transported, and received from Federal lands.'

The Bureau of Land Management and FBI are investigating the case with assistance from the Grand County Sheriff and San Juan County Sheriff Offices.

'The Bureau of Land Management should be greatly commended in dismantling the illegal trade of paleontology artifacts here in our community,' said Grand County Sheriff Jamison Wiggins.

All four defendants are charged with conspiracy against the United States, Paleontological Resources Preservation Act violation, theft of property of the United States, money laundering, and other charges.

The defendants were scheduled for their initial court appearance on Thursday afternoon in Salt Lake City.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12650947/dinosaur-bones-stolen-Wade-Willing-charges-Utah.html

NASA’s Webb Discovers New Feature in Jupiter’s Atmosphere

OCT 19, 2023

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has discovered a new, never-before-seen feature in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The high-speed jet stream, which spans more than 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) wide, sits over Jupiter’s equator above the main cloud decks. The discovery of this jet is giving insights into how the layers of Jupiter’s famously turbulent atmosphere interact with each other, and how Webb is uniquely capable of tracking those features.

“This is something that totally surprised us,” said Ricardo Hueso of the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, lead author on the paper describing the findings. “What we have always seen as blurred hazes in Jupiter’s atmosphere now appear as crisp features that we can track along with the planet’s fast rotation.”

The research team analyzed data from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) captured in July 2022. The Early Release Science program – jointly led by Imke de Pater from the University of California, Berkeley and Thierry Fouchet from the Observatory of Paris – was designed to take images of Jupiter 10 hours apart, or one Jupiter day, in four different filters, each uniquely able to detect changes in small features at different altitudes of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

“Even though various ground-based telescopes, spacecraft like NASA’s Juno and Cassini, and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have observed the Jovian system’s changing weather patterns, Webb has already provided new findings on Jupiter’s rings, satellites, and its atmosphere,” de Pater noted.

While Jupiter is different from Earth in many ways – Jupiter is a gas giant, Earth is a rocky, temperate world – both planets have layered atmospheres. Infrared, visible, radio, and ultraviolet light wavelengths observed by these other missions detect the lower, deeper layers of the planet’s atmosphere – where gigantic storms and ammonia ice clouds reside.

On the other hand, Webb’s look farther into the near-infrared than before is sensitive to the higher-altitude layers of the atmosphere, around 15-30 miles (25-50 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops. In near-infrared imaging, high-altitude hazes typically appear blurry, with enhanced brightness over the equatorial region. With Webb, finer details are resolved within the bright hazy band.

The newly discovered jet stream travels at about 320 miles per hour (515 kilometers per hour), twice the sustained winds of a Category 5 hurricane here on Earth. It is located around 25 miles (40 kilometers) above the clouds, in Jupiter’s lower stratosphere.

By comparing the winds observed by Webb at high altitudes, to the winds observed at deeper layers from Hubble, the team could measure how fast the winds change with altitude and generate wind shears.

While Webb’s exquisite resolution and wavelength coverage allowed for the detection of small cloud features used to track the jet, the complementary observations from Hubble taken one day after the Webb observations were also crucial to determine the base state of Jupiter’s equatorial atmosphere and observe the development of convective storms in Jupiter’s equator not connected to the jet.

“We knew the different wavelengths of Webb and Hubble would reveal the three-dimensional structure of storm clouds, but we were also able to use the timing of the data to see how rapidly storms develop,” added team member Michael Wong of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the associated Hubble observations.

The researchers are looking forward to additional observations of Jupiter with Webb to determine if the jet’s speed and altitude change over time.

“Jupiter has a complicated but repeatable pattern of winds and temperatures in its equatorial stratosphere, high above the winds in the clouds and hazes measured at these wavelengths,” explained team member Leigh Fletcher of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. “If the strength of this new jet is connected to this oscillating stratospheric pattern, we might expect the jet to vary considerably over the next 2 to 4 years – it’ll be really exciting to test this theory in the years to come.”

“It’s amazing to me that, after years of tracking Jupiter’s clouds and winds from numerous observatories, we still have more to learn about Jupiter, and features like this jet can remain hidden from view until these new NIRCam images were taken in 2022,” continued Fletcher.

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-discovers-new-feature-in-jupiters-atmosphere/

NASA releases new image of Earth taken from space during annular solar eclipse: See the stunning shot

October 19, 2023 11:59am EDT

A new image from NASA shows a recent moment when millions of Americans stopped to check out the sun — using proper precautions to protect their eyes, of course.

An annular solar eclipse occurred on Oct. 14 and Americans across the country were in the direct line of crossing.

NASA released an image of the Earth just as the moon was passing in front of the sun.

This moment, also known as an annular solar eclipse, was captured when the moon’s shadow crossed North America.

The image was acquired by NASA’s EPIC imager, which is aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory — a joint NASA, NOAA and U.S. Air Force satellite, as NASA reported.

The picture was taken at a point between the sun and the Earth, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, according to NASA.

The image captured the moon at or near its furthest distance from Earth — with NASA noting that it makes the moon look smaller in the sky than it really is.

https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/nasa-releases-new-image-earth-taken-space-during-annular-solar-eclipse-stunning-shot

>>19767638

some serious foreshadowing