Showing posts with label Geology in Pop Culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Geology in Pop Culture. Show all posts

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Geology in Pop Culture - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

 Geology in Pop Culture: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

When I started preparing my talk for the 2023 annual Geological Society of America conference (Finding Hidden Geological Lessons in the Media Around Us), I knew that I wanted to talk about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It is a movie that had been on my radar to write about for many years and I figured it would be a fairly easy one to throw into the talk. However, when I started to do my regular research into it, fascinating things started to pop up and I figured as part of my talk, I would give the audience a walk through of my process. And that is what I will do here as well....

When we first are introduced to the eponymous dwarfs of the movie, we discover them as workers in a mine. 

The dwarfs working in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

And it turns out they have vocal talent as well, but that's besides the point. To start my research I needed to verify what it was that they were actually digging for. I assumed it was diamonds but I could not recall if it was ever stated as such.  


As the lyrics of their song state: "where a million diamonds shine". So clearly this is a diamond mine, as I was led to believe. 

From here there are several avenues that one can take while looking at this. I first wanted to confirm my suspicions, not just about the diamonds, which we just did, but also about the placement of the story. Another assumption of mine that I wanted to confirm, was whether Snow White was German. The story was written by the German writing pair, the Brothers Grimm, in 1812 as Sneewittchen, indicating that she was likely German. And while this doesn't mean that the Disney version of the character is also German, you can currently meet Snow White in Germany at EPCOT, pretty much confirming that Snow White is German (at least in the eyes of Disney).

Step 1: The original inspiration
But let us bring this back even further. What was the original inspiration for the character. Was she actually German? Did she live in a mining town? And if she did, did they mine diamonds?

The True Story Behind Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs article from Curious Historian. 

It is thought that the real life inspiration to the character of Snow White was Margarete von Waldeck, born to a prominent family in Waldeck, Germany in 1533. Many aspects of her life line up with the fairy tale per the article, but the most important one was that the town of Waldeck was a mining town. The only problem was that the mine was a copper mine, not a diamond mine. And those are two very different things in geology. So although the mine might still have sparkled with the light reflecting off the metal deposits, it is not a diamond mine. 

So we move on. 

Step 2: The Source for Diamonds
Although the real life Snow White didn't live near a diamond mine, we still assume that the character of Snow White is German and lived near a German diamond mine, if such a thing exists. So let us look at real life diamond mine localities. 

There are several ways that diamonds can form, and therefore there are several different types of deposits that they can be found in, but by far the most common types of deposits are known as kimberlites. 

Kimberlite model. Image courtesy of the Kansas Geological Survey. 

Kimberlites are the result of magma from deep in the Earth's mantle that gets erupted on the surface in a rapid and violent type of eruption. Deep in the mantle is where the pressures are high enough for diamonds to form, which typically happens at 150 to 700 km deep in the Earth. The diamonds are then carried upwards in these kimberlite eruptions, where they can then be found on the surface of the Earth.

Global kimberlite localities. From Tappe et al., 2018.

 However, there is a problem when we look at the global distribution of kimberlite deposits.

Blow up of European kimberlite deposits. From Tappe et al., 2018.

There are no kimberlite deposits in mainland Europe. So unless Snow White was Scandinavian or Russian, we are at a dead-end here as well.

Step 3: Alternative Diamond Sources

And this is where the story takes an interesting turn. During my research for diamonds in Germany, I did come across one fascinating story. It turns out that 15 million years ago the town of Nördlingen, Germany was struck by a meteorite. 

Norlingen, Germany. Image courtesy of The Travel.

Known as the Nördlinger Ries impact crater, the asteroid that struck the Earth was going at least 70,000 km/h forming an impact crater 25 km across and 500 m deep. When meteorites strike the surface of the Earth, they do so with tremendous speed, creating very high pressures. The pressures produced from this impact were large enough that they could potentially create diamonds, if the rock they are impacting has the proper carbon concentration (carbon being the element that diamonds are made out of). 

The Nördlinger Ries impact crater. Image courtesy of Digital Geology. 

The rocks in the area of Nördlingen were mostly sedimentary rocks (limestones, shales, and sandstones) however there is also a significant amount of graphite-bearing gneissic rocks. Graphite is another mineral that is entirely made up of carbon and is often the source mineral for artificial diamond creations. The impact of the Nördlinger Ries meteorite was then able to transformed the graphite in these source rocks into tons and tons of microscopic diamonds. 

Article highlighting all of the diamonds from the Nordlingen impact. Image courtesy of The Travel. 

On average the diamonds produced from the impact were less than 0.2 mm, however the total amount of diamonds is estimated to be 72,000 tons! That's a lot of diamonds. So it is my theory that Snow White and the seven dwarfs lived near the Nördlingen impact crater and mined the diamonds from a meteorite impact. 

References
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Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Geology in Pop Culture - The Rescuers Down Under

 Geology in Pop Culture

Released in 1990, The Rescuers Down Under continues the escapades started in 1977's The Rescuers. However, in this adventure our favorite mice, Bernard and Bianca, travel down to the Australian outback (not the steakhouse). Here, they find that the villain of the story, the poacher Percival C. McLeach has kidnapped a boy, Cody, while hiding out in some abandoned opal mines.

 

So what exactly is opal anyway?

Different types of Australian opal varieties. Image courtesy of BlackOpal Direct. 

Opal (SiO2.H2O) is a mineral that forms from the packed spheres of silica (SiO2), also known as the mineral quartz. Opal is a hydrated form of silica where water has been shown to include between 3 and 9% of the total mineral structure. Unlike many minerals, because of how it is formed, opal is amorphous, or without form. This means that there is no crystal structure or cleavage that is seen in most other minerals. Opal forms through the processes of solidification of gelatinous or liquid silica within cracks and voids of other rocks. 

Since the opals are created by spheres of silica and water, the size of the sphere's dictates the colors that are produced. These colors are refracted through the opal like a prism, with larger spheres yielding red or orange, and smaller ones radiating blue. However, this is only the case with precious opals, the more gem quality ones. Most opals, ~95%, are referred to as common opals. These are opals that do not have the "play-of-color" expected in opals as seen in the image above. Although still beautiful, they are harder to identify than the precious opals. 

Location of Australian Opal Mines. Image courtesy of Opals Down Under. 

Despite being found around the world, it turns out that ~95% of the world's supply of precious opals comes from Australia. The opals started to form during the Cretaceous period when there was a large inland sea across Australia. During this time silica rich sands were deposited along the shorelines, then 30 million years ago, during the Tertiary, deep weathering of these sediments within the Australian Artesian Basin released large amounts of soluble silica into the groundwater. This silica traveled into the cracks and fissures in the Cretaceous age rocks where it was stopped by an impermeable layer below. Staying in the cracks and fissures, the opal deposits formed veins, often trapping fossils that also happen to be in the sedimentary rocks such as leaves, dinosaurs, small mammals, and marine reptiles such as Eric the Pliosaur. 

Eric the opalized pliosaur. Image courtesy of Opal Auctions. 

Most of the opal mines in Australia are a type known as open-cut. This means that they basically dig down to the source of the deposit, in this case opal, and clear out anything above it, forming a quarry or pit. This limits the dangers of enclosed mine spaces, allows you to find smaller deposits easier, is much faster with heavy machinery, but is also much, MUCH, more damaging to the environment, destroying literally everything to get to the deposits. 

In The Rescuers Down Under though, they are clearly not in an open-cut mine, they are underground mines. There are some underground opal mines that are found within Australia. One of these locations is the town of Mintabie, found near the north-central portion of the South Australian state. And although they did use open-pit mining in Mintabie, they also had quite a number of underground mines as seen in the picture below.

Mintabie Opal Mines. Image courtesy of Opal Auctions. 

What makes Mintabie interesting is that the mining heyday here was in the 1980's. Even though opals had been know from here since the 1920's, production increased starting in 1976 with the addition of mining equipment able to break through the hard sandstone. During the 1980's, production here was the largest in all of Australia with a peak during 1988. However, after 1988, production quickly declined resulting in lots of abandoned opal mines. 

Warning sign in The Rescuers Down Under

This timing of the opal mines being abandoned during the late 1980's correlates strongly with The Rescuers Down Under, which would have been starting to be in production probably ~1988. Seeing these abandoned opal mines pop up all over the place would have been a good impetus to a setting for their movie. 
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Sunday, November 05, 2023

Geology in Art - The Far Side

Gary Larson is most well-known as the comic artist who created The Far Side, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995. The Far Side was a series of one-off single panel comics that basically poked fun at nearly every aspect of everyday life. He has since returned to producing The Far Side comics in 2020, which can be found currently on his website: thefarside.com.
 

Back in 1982, an issue of The Far Side ran that featured what can essentially be called a presentation (a scientific presentation?) where one caveman is lecturing a group of cave people about the tail of a Stegosaurus. At which point he says 
"Now, this end is called the thagomizer ... after the late Thag Simmons."
It is from here that we don't have geology influencing art, but art influencing geology, or more specifically, paleontology. 

Stegosaurus from the Field Museum, Chicago, IL

Prior to this, the tail spikes of a Stegosaurus did not have a scientific name associated with them. However, paleontologists often do have a sense of humor and after awhile they started to incorporate the name into scientific presentations and literature. It started in 1993 when Ken Carpenter, a paleontologist then with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, used the term while describing a new species of Stegosaurus during a presentation for the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting. 

Following that, the term spread and was included in actual scientific publications including 1997's The Complete Dinosaur. From 2000 on, the usage of "thagomizer" exploded both in the scientific literature and outside of it. And while there are some holdouts that this term is not scientifically valid, continued consistent usage in the scientific literature is a requisite for scientific validity and this seems to have satisfied that requisite. 

Usage of the term "thagomizer" through time. Courtesy of Google NGram. 

References
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Saturday, November 04, 2023

Geology in Art - The Scream

Not sure if this will be a new series or not but I always found the inclusion of geology in the media that surrounds us to often times be surprising. And that includes the Art around us. In this instance we have Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893):

 Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, Norway

Edvard Munch was a Norwegian artist, living in Norway at the time. In his diary entry of January 22, 1892, Munch had described his inspiration for The Scream:
One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord—the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream.
There is also a poem that he had written from 1895 with much the same vibe (Daily Art Magazine):
I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.
There is no set time when this happened though, except that it must have been before the 1892 journal entry. It has been postulated (Olson et al., 2004) that the cause of this "blood red" sunset was from the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in Indonesia on August 27th, 1883. 

And while the eruption of Krakatoa was literally half a world away, there are other instances where the eruption impacted sunsets across the globe. There is a report in Pennsylvania from the Hanover Spectator from December 19th of 1883 where it is reported:
Residents “… witnessed a most beautiful and startling phenomenon … the sky … was fairly aglow with crimson and golden fires.”
Mount Krakatoa. Image courtesy of the Global Volcanism Project. 

Krakatoa (or Mount Krakatoa) is a stratovolcano located within the Pacific Ring of Fire and produced one of the largest eruptions in recorded history. 

During the eruption, ash was sent 50 miles into the atmosphere covering 300,000 square miles. The ash eventually circled the globe dropping the global temperature by a full degree Celsius the year following the eruption. It took 5 years for the Earth's temperature to revert to normal. The final eruption produced a shockwave that was heard by 10% of the Earth's surface and ejected as much as 5 cubic miles of rock fragments into the air, causing the island to collapse down into it's 3.8 mile wide caldera. In addition, pyroclastic flows were produced, clouds of hot dust and ash of more than 300 degrees Celsius traveling at over 100 kph, wiping out everything for miles around the volcano. And the most devastation was produced by the series of tsunamis that smashed into 165 coastal villages in the surrounding islands of Java and Sumatra, extending to the Arabian peninsula, killing 36,000 people. 

It seems like based on Munch's personal accounts of the blood red sunset and the cause of that sunset, that it was indeed possible that the eruption was the impetus for the creation of The Scream.

References'

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Wednesday, December 01, 2021

Geology in Pop Culture - Salt Lake City Trax Station

 I love little nods to geology in everyday life and one of the Salt Lake City Trax stations has some geological themed plaques that I had been wanting to get pictures of for years. Well, since I was planning on moving I figured it was now or never and I ended up getting the pictures about a month before I left (in March of 2021). This is actually nearby to another Trax station with other geological themed materials I had taken pictures of previously.  

The Trax Station, which is known as Gallivan Plaza, has a series of "X" shaped plaques embedded within the floor of the station with various facts about Salt Lake City and Utah in general.

There are 8 X's in total (at least the ones I found) and I am including all of them here. Even though some of the X's pictured at the bottom here don't have geologically related content, they do have interesting information. 

...the Great Salt Lake usually measures about 2100 square miles; Lake Michigan is about 24,400 square miles...
...the pronghorn antelope is Utah's fastest mammal and Antelope Island was named for it...
The Great Salt Lake is one of the most notable geological features in the region, being an end basin (meaning the water does not flow out to any ocean and ends up in the lake) and is the largest lake in the United States outside of the Great Lakes (of which only Lake Michigan is completely in the United States). Since it is an endbasin, all of the dissolved minerals like salt build up over time and eventually make the Great Salt Lake the salty landmark it is today.

...salinity in the Great Salt Lake is about 8 times that of the ocean and companies harvest the salt for more than 1,000 uses...
...the first successful artificial heart and kidney were transplanted here...
As mentioned above, the salts in the Great Salt Lake have built up over many 10's of thousands to 100's of thousands of years as the water eroded the surrounding landscape and deposited the salts in the lake like a pan of water set to boil too long. Oceans typically have salinity between 34 and 36 ppt (parts per thousand), meaning that if you take 1,000 grams of oceanic water and evaporate all of the water away, you would be left with 34 to 36 grams of salt. While the Great Salt Lake varies depending on location within the lake, the range of salinity goes from 50 ppt in the Southern Arm to 240 ppt in the Northern Arm. Eight times the value of oceanic salinity at 35 ppt is indeed around the highest levels of salinity in the Great Salt Lake (~280 ppt). 

...about 350 tons of fossil were excavated near Dinosaur National Monument in the early 1900's...
...a mountain once stood where the world's largest open pit mine now sits in nearby Binghan (sp) Canyon...
Although proclaimed a national monument in 1915, the main dinosaur quarry was still actively excavated until 1924. The excavation was led by Earl Douglass, working for the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh, and continued until funding eventually ran out after Andrew Carnegie died. Douglass left the quarry in 1924, and since then no bones have been removed. From discover in 1909 until 1924 Douglass ended up removing nearly 350 tons of fossils, mostly dinosaurs, including fossils of Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Barosaurus, Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Torvosaurus, Camptosaurus, Dryosaurus, and Stegosaurus. The quarry sits within the Jurassic age Morrison Formation and I go much more into the geology of Dinosaur National Monument HERE. 

Located in the Oquirrh Mountains on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley, the Bingham (Spelled "Binghan" in the plaque) Canyon mine was indeed a former mountain that had been slowly whittled away over time. Per the Utah Geological Survey, the Bingham Canyon Mine:
"...  is one of the largest and most efficient mines in the world. It has produced more copper than any other district in the U.S., accounting for over 16% of total U.S. copper production. In addition to copper, the mine produces gold, molybdenum, and silver. KUC’s combined annual value of these metals peaked in 2011 at $2.9 billion."
Currently the Bingham Copper Mine is the 2nd most active copper producing mine in the US and one of the top gold producers in the US as well. I go much more into the geology of the mine HERE as well. 

...11 national parks are located less than a day's drive from here...
...the usual humidity here is 15% or less...
I assume the 11 national parks here are just the parks designated as "National Parks" including Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Great Basin, Arches, Bryce, Zion, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, Rocky Mountain, Death Valley, and the Grand Canyon. That doesn't even include the numerous parks run by the National Park Service within and surrounding Utah.  

Although Salt Lake City itself doesn't qualify as a desert, the western part of the state easily does. A desert, by definition, is any place that gets less than 10 inches of precipitation a year. That means that there is typically not much water in the air, and hence a very low amount of humidity. Salt Lake City itself averages 19.5 inches a year of rainfall, and much of that is due to the mountains inducing rain to the east of the city.

..."Wasatch" means "mountains of many waters"... 
...several major and minor fault lines are located along the Wasatch Range...
The Wasatch mountains are the mountain range found along the east side of the Salt Lake Valley. Although the the translation on the plaque says Wasatch mean "mountains of many waters" the most common translation that I can find is that Wasatch is a Ute word meaning "low place in high mountains", of which I can see the correlation between the two. 

And as for the faults:

As this map from the Utah Geological Survey can attest to, the Wasatch Front is indeed riddled faults. The Wasatch Fault itself is not just one continuous line but a series of short faults that all interconnect with each other. That is why it is more accurate to say the "Wasatch Fault Zone" since there are so many smaller fault segments. 

The following plaques have some of the less geologically related facts.
...a recipe for storable pemmican cake: dried grasshoppers and crickets mixed with berries...
...no fish live in the Great Salt Lake but other lake life include tiny brine shrimp and larvae of small brine flies...
Random fact: the brine shrimp of the Great Salt Lake have been more commonly mass marketed as "sea monkeys". 

...the Great Salt Lake Valley has been continuously inhabited for over 10,000 years...
...Utah is named for the Ute Indians and "ute" means "a high place"...

I love the Native American facts that these plaques provide as well. Especially since Utah has such a rich Native history with tribes indeed occupying the lands now known as Utah for many centuries before any of the European descended explorers entered the picture.  

...the first recorded knowledge of the Great Salt Lake was by Silvestre de Escalante in 1776 but he never actually saw the lake...
...the world's largest genealogical library is located here and records date back to the 1500s...
And the final plaque. We actually visited the genealogical library run by the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (you don't need to be a member to use the library), which has a ton of resources for those seeking their family history, not just from Utah but from around the globe.
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Tuesday, April 06, 2021

Geology and Paleontology in Pop Culture - The Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium

 Back in August of 2019, I was able to go visit my mother in Florida without the threat of doom and on the trip we visited the local Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Sarasota. The Mote is broken up into several buildings over a nice campus with some great animal displays within it. But, as always, my focus tends to be drawn to geology and paleontology of the place. 

Geology

The Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium sits on the Lido Key, off the western coast of Florida within the Gulf of Mexico. The most notable geological thing that I found was the building stone that was surrounding one of the larger shark tanks. 


Here is a little bit of a zoomed out shot of the building stone. A closer look below will reveal what type of building stone we are looking at.


As we can see by the clearly coral fossils in this part of the rock, this is a limestone. Brain coral in particular here. There are many types of limestones based on what they are made up of. The term limestone just means that the rock is primarily composed of the calcium carbonate, typically in the form of the mineral calcite. Calcite can form in a few different ways, but the most common way is through the processes of marine organisms like the making of clam shells or coral skeletons. 


The different building blocks within the shark tank enclosure have some variety with what types of fossils are visible. Within this block we can see some shells, which are mostly up of some gastropods (snail) and bivales (like clams). 


A close up of some more coral.


And more coral. This piece is interesting because the upper left piece of coral and the lower right piece of coral are the same type of coral, just cut at different angles.

When identifying limestones, there a couple of different classifications that are used. Since this is clearly a reef rock, based on the presence of so much corals, that is what we want to focus on. 

Limestone classification of reef rocks. Image courtesy of SEPM.

My knowledge of limestone classifications is definitely limited, however based on the structure of the corals within the rock, they appear to be "autochthonous", which means that they had not been transported before they were turned into a rock. All of the above limestone pictures also probably don't fit into the same category, however I would say the majority of the blocks likely fall into the Framestone or Bafflestone category of limestone. 

On the coastal islands, there isn't much, if any, building stone localities so these must have been trucked in from somewhere, however I can't find any mention of specifically where they came from. They did likely originate locally due to the large abundance of coral reef limestones within the state of Florida. 

Paleontology

There are a few paleontological themed areas of the aquarium as well. This includes the "Fossil Creek" area, where people can get bags of sand filled with fossilized shark teeth. This area is highlighted by one of the most famous fossil sharks, the Otodus megalodon, more commonly just called the Megalodon.


A full sized rendering of what the Megalodon jaw would have looked like. However, only teeth of the Megalodon have ever been found so the entire jaw reconstruction is just that, a theorized reconstruction.


I love that in this version of the reconstruction they didn't even bother to hide the painterly strokes along the cartilage jaw.


Next to the Megalodon jaw there is also a couple of display cases with other fossil shark teeth including tiger, hammerhead, great white, mako, and of course the Megalodon. 


There are also some fossilized vertebrae, as well as other animal bits scattered throughout the cases.


I didn't take a picture of the identification sign, however I don't know if there even was one. But what interests me here, is that mixed among the mostly marine fossils are the teeth of a mammoth. Although there have been some mammoth discoveries in Florida (they aren't unheard of), just unexpected in a marine museum. 

These teeth, and other bones, may actually belong to a discovery of a nearby mammoth from Salt Creek, near Warm Mineral Springs, Florida back in 1987. 

Newspaper image of a pair of mammoth teeth found in 1987 from Salt Creek, Florida. Image courtesy of Warm Mineral Springs.

The newspaper listing of the find state an unknown age at the time of discovery, but that the fossils will likely be stored at the Mote Aquarium. 

And the last fossil I saw at the Mote is a vertebrae of whale tail found in southwestern Florida. 


Of course they also have modern skeletons on display. Here is the skeleton of a manatee.


And the skeleton of a giant sea turtle. 

Underside view of the sea turtle.

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Friday, February 19, 2021

Dinos in Pop Culture - Star Trek: Voyager - Entry 3

 And the last of my Star Trek entries into the Geology and Dinos in Pop Culture is perhaps the greatest dinosaurian related episode of Star Trek to date. The episode is from Star Trek: Voyager, Season 3, Episode 23, entitled "Distant Origin".

This clip above is just a small portion of the episode, in which I highly recommend watching the whole thing if possible. In the episode, the crew of the Voyager are faced with the Voth. A species that, after some genetic determination, evolved from hadrosaursians and somehow ended up across the galaxy into the Delta Quadrant. Their supposition was that this hadrosaurian species survived the extinction of the dinosaurs and were isolated on an island, where eventually they evolved space-faring technology to somehow eventually leave Earth and end up across the cosmos. The best part is when they start researching the history of the Voth, leading them to Eryops, "from the Devonian era". 

Eryops from the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Distant Origin"

Their reconstruction of Eryops though, does not actually resemble the current reconstructions (pictured below). Nor is it from the Devonian, having been found in Permian deposits over 100 million years later. However, this reconstruction looks amazingly like a pelycosaur, like Dimetrodon, just without the sail.

Eryops reconstruction from Britannica. 

Eryops was an amphibian, and was supposed to stand in on Voyager as the "last common ancestor of cold-blooded and warm-blooded organisms." My assumption is that they were looking for the split between mammals and reptiles. However, that is not entirely an accurate thing, since mammals evolved much later. What we need to search for is the split between Synapsids (the group that evolved into and includes mammals) and Diapsids (the group that includes crocodilians, dinosaurs, and birds). Both of these groups fall under the classification of amniotes. 

The branch between these groups is thought to have taken place in the Lower Permian, approximately 300 million years ago and would have involved early synapsids, such as the pelycosaurs (kind of pictured in the show) . And although pelycosaurs are considered basal synapsids, not the ancestors to both dinosaurs and mammals, it's not out of the realm of possibility that the actual ancestor would have several similar characteristics. 

Dimetrodon skeleton. Image courtesy of ScienceSourceImages.

So although their name dropping of Eryops was 100% incorrect, perhaps their model was a bit closer to reality. 

The show also asks what was the "most highly evolved cold-blooded organism to develop from the Eryops" and the show pictures a Hadrosaur. Specifically, a Parasaurolophus. 

The "most highly evolved" dinosaur according to Star Trek: Voyager.

Evolutionarily speaking, all reptiles, and this includes all dinosaurs/birds, would have evolved from the basal diapsids. So by saying the "most highly evolved", you are making assumptions that one organism is more evolved than another one, which is not how evolution works. There is no organism that is "more highly evolved" than another. Each organism is adapted to their own environment. I am assuming by "more highly evolved" they mean more intelligent, which is another matter entirely. And even then, it is assumed that the theropod branch of dinosaurs, the one that evolves into birds, would be much more intelligent than the sauropods, which were larger and lumbering herbivorous dinosaurs. Heck, the birds even survived the end Cretaceous extinction, which none of the Sauropods did. (well except this one branch that went off into space.

Evolution of the Voth from their Parasaurolophus ancestors

My last point about the episode is where they show where the Parasaurolophus evolved into a "more advanced" race, the Voth in this instance. This evolutionary idea that should the dinosaurs have survived the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous (minus birds of course), they had the potential to evolve into a humanoid species. This is not a new concept to Star Trek. Back in 1982, (Russell and Séguin) proposed a similar idea while studying the troodontid Stenonychosaurus. 

Reconstructions of the small Cretaceous theropod Stenonychosaurus inequalis and a hypothetical dinosaurid (Russell and Séguin, 1982)


While being a bit tongue in cheek, it has prompted discussion about the possibilities of future evolution of the non-avian dinosaurs ever since. 

So, however you see it, this episode was a dinosaur wonderland. 

References
Russell, D. A., and Séguin, R., 1982, Reconstructions of the small Cretaceous theropod Stenonychosaurus inequalis and a hypothetical dinosaurid: Syllogeus, v. 37, p. 1-43
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