Tuesday, February 9, 2021
Fouls, turnovers, rebounding The Cowboys fall to Kansas after a sloppy game
By Chris Becker
OSU Athletics Despite scoring 26 points, Cade Cunningham has seven turnovers in a loss to Kansas
Oklahoma State had the chance to do something only done once before. Sweep a Bill Self-led Kansas team in Big 12 play, and the only team complete that feat was OSU in 2018. Instead, the No. 23 Cowboys fell to Kansas 7866 for the Cowboys second loss in three games. Coming off a big double-overtime win over Texas, OSU did not look the part of a newly-ranked team. In the loss, the Cowboys committed 24 fouls, were outrebounded by 13 and gave the ball up 18 times. “Judging by the stats,
I feel as if we gave up too many offensive rebounds, the last game the same thing happened and we were able to escape from it,” Isaac Likekele said. “This game, we weren’t able to escape from it, they made us pay for it. We fouled too much as a team and a unit.” Turnovers have been a reoccurring issue for the Cowboys in recent games, especially for OSU star Cade Cunningham. Despite having a better shooting performance, scoring 26 points and grabbing nine rebounds, Cunningham turned the ball over seven times. “(Fixing turnovers) it definitely starts with me,” Cunningham said. “Looking at the number the last few games, I’m probably leading the country in turnovers. I have the ball in my hands a See Fouls on pg. 6
Fossil Findings OSU paleontologist discusses paleontology, Argentina discovery By Robert Owens The recent resurfacing of the bones discovered in Argentina’s Neuquén Province has paleontologists all over the world discussing new possibilities. The bones are believed to have belonged to a titanosaur, a dinosaur species belonging to a group of enormous sauropods. Experts believe this find could be the largest dinosaur to ever have lived. Here we discuss this topic and more with Oklahoma State University’s own paleontologist, Anne Weil. Weil is a vertebrate paleontologist, meaning she studies animals with a backbone; this includes dinosaurs. She specializes in the Jurassic period, which is supposed to be about 150 million years ago. “I started on this path to paleontology since I was 22,” Weil said, “I’ve gotten into Sauropod dinosaurs, but I started with Mesozoic mammals. Vertebrate paleontologists study comparative anatomy, relating the bones back to the animal.” Publishing 32 research reports since 1992, Weil has been focusing on Sauropods for some time now. With her latest endeavor working at an older site dating back to the Jurassic era, there’s more to discover than dinosaurs. “It’s not just a vertebrate site, but an invertebrate site
too” Weil said, “there’s a lot for people to work on, it gives us a good snapshot of a whole ecosystem,” Weil said. “With a site like this you’re presented with a lot of different animals” Weil said“and your first question is ‘what am I looking at’”? Research coming from this site can lead to the revelation of much more information such as describing new species and learning the anatomy of extinct animals. Weil has said the site includes a healthy range of creatures from shrimp and fish to the giant Sauropod dinosaurs. “The site is about 152 million years old,” Weil said, “and we get that from the rocks more than the bones. We can also tell if something is feeding on animals, we have scratches on the bones from teeth” Oklahoma is known for having a large number of Sauropod findings. In fact, the Sam Nobel museum has a display of the largest Apatosaurus, along with its baby. Sauropods start off small, around the size of a pony, while the adults are around 35 m (115 ft.) and 80 metric tons (176,370 pounds). “In Oklahoma, we have an animal called Sauroposeidon, which is more closely related to the animal found in Argentina,” Weil said, “it’s known for neck vertebrae and it’s pretty big too, all Sauropods are huge.”
Emily Weed
For most fossil finds, you won’t get the whole animal, you’ll have parts of it and need to run a lot of tests to determine its size and habits. Scientists base their estimates on their features, like shoulder blades and neck vertebrae, along with comparing them to multiple other samples of the same species. “You’re always going to have a range of answers,”
Weil said, “the more of a skeleton you have the more information you can give.” On her team, she works with many different geologists, paleontologists, and various students. The levels can vary going from fieldwork to working on an X-ray powder diffraction (XRD). See Fossil on pg. 2