Throughout Roman times, amber was considered the ‘Gold of the North’. It was believed to have medicinal properties that cured arthritis, protected people from suffering mental illness, and healed sore throats. People also thought it […]
Deposits Magazine
The Magazine on Fossils, Geology & Minerals. Deposits is both a printed and online magazine featuring articles by high profile authors.
Fossil folklore: ammonites
People have collected fossils since prehistoric times. In pre-scientific times, a remarkable folklore developed about how fossils originated and their usefulness. Folklore refers to the beliefs – usually non-scientific – and customs of ordinary people. […]
Orphan mine site taken into care
One of New Zealand’s most contaminated sites, the Tui Mine near Te Aroha, is to be cleaned up. The New Zealand budget for 2007 confirmed that NZ$9.88 million was available for the two-year project. The […]
Denizens of the Oxford Clay
In many ways, Britain is the birth-place of palaeontology, and the heady years of the 19th century saw the discovery of creatures that have inspired the imagination of small boys ever since – myself included. […]
An Ammonite Pendant from Highland New Guinea
In recent years, a number of ammonite pendants, similar to the one in Fig. 1, have been offered by tribal art dealers. As scientific objects, they offer the interest all fossils – a chance to […]
Geology and terrestrial life of the Carboniferous
The Carboniferous Period is a fascinating time in earth history. It spanned 60myrs (359.2 to 299.0mya), towards the end of the Palaeozoic era, falling between the Devonian and Permian. During the Carboniferous, the supercontinent Pangaea […]
Blue John stone: a remarkable fluorite from a limestone cavern
Blue John stone is the name given to banded fluorite found in the Castleton area of Derbyshire in England (Ollernshaw, 1964). It has been prized for centuries. Chemically, it is a calcium fluoride (CaF2) and […]
Essential collectibles #8: Coprolites
Our look at those fossils that commonly bought rather than collected has so far looked at the fossil remains of animals, whether shells, teeth or whatever. But this time we’re looking at a trace fossil; […]
Mineral Guide: Selenite
I got this selenite crystal at the first Pebble Pups meeting I attended. As a result, I researched this crystal and found lots of interesting facts, in particular, that it was very unique. This particular […]
Fossil arachnids
When it comes to fossils, arachnids are not a group that obviously springs to mind. However, with more than 100,000 described living species, Arachnida form the second most diverse group of primarily land-living organisms after […]
Rare amber inclusion of harvestman
Recently, I was lucky enough to unearth a prize find – a 40-million-year-old, spider-like insect perfectly preserved in amber. I found the valuable harvestman in a piece of prehistoric amber and considered it to be […]
An introduction to aetosaurs
The Triassic Period was one of the key episodes in the evolutionary history of life. It marks the transition from the Palaeozoic to the Mesozoic Era, preceded by the Permian/Triassic mass extinction – the greatest […]
Urban geology: A sunny Sunday in Hoofddorp
The last weekend in September 2013 was sunny after more than two weeks of grey skies, rain and even some fog. Saturday was spent as planned, moving bookcases ahead of Karen’s insatiable paintbrush, the walls […]
Baffling bones from Lyme Regis
A recent find from Lower Jurassic marine deposits on the Dorset Coast consists of a curious association of bones and bone fragments that have so far eluded identification, despite being inspected by some top palaeontologists. […]
A Palaeocene Lagerstätte in France
A Lagerstätte is a sedimentary deposit that exhibits exquisite fossil richness, detail and/or completeness, often preserving fine details, including soft parts, which wouldn’t normally be found as fossils. There are two main types of fossil […]
A Living Fossil in the Petrified Forest
It’s a Welwitschia! Nestling among 280 million year old fossil tree trunks, this is the rare plant I have been searching for. Two wonders of the natural world – the living, sprawling Welwitschia and the […]
Dinosaur Farm museum on Dinosaur Island
The Isle of Wight has long been regarded as a world famous fossil locality. It is now called Dinosaur Island, with no less than 29 different species having been found along the southern coast. Indeed, […]
Dinosaurs in Scotland
The existence of dinosaurs in Scotland is not something that is generally well known. Yet, there are at least three different families represented from fossil bones and a number of different footprint types from the […]
Brazilian ‘Garden of Gold’
There is an old maxim in the mining industry that says, “Mines are where you find them”. To put it another way, you cannot change the location of geological deposits. This is frequently unfortunate for […]
Fossil forests in the freezer
South of the craggy limits of Patagonia, Africa and Tasmania, and beyond the piercing gales of the roaring forties and the furious fifties, lies Antarctica – the last great continent on Earth to be explored. […]
The end-Permian mass extinction
The end Permian mass extinction occurred 251mya and marked the end of the Palaeozoic era. The loss of life is currently estimated to consist of 95% of the marine fauna and around 70 to 77% […]
Mollusc diversity for palaeontologists
While arthropods and roundworms exceed the phylum Mollusca in terms of species, molluscs hold their own when it comes to anatomical diversity. There may be well over a million species of arthropod, but crabs, spiders […]
Mining in ancient Greece and Rome
Ancient civilizations had a high demand for raw materials, like clay, diverse rocks and, most of all, metals. These were required for buildings, crafts, agriculture, their armed forces, financial concerns, art and culture. Clays and […]
The saber-toothed cat of the North Sea
Somewhere around the Dutch coast, a mammoth herd, led by an experienced matriarch strolls along a trail on the cold, dry and treeless steppe – the mammoth steppe – typified by tall, tough grasses and […]
Urban geology: monumental geology
My writings on urban geology are normally centred in the area around my home in Noord Holland, but sometimes I am lucky enough to travel. A personal wish that I have had since I was […]
Colossal tortoises
Most people are familiar with the famous giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands – isolated oddities evolving in the absence of predators on a remote tropical paradise. However, as little as 5mya, continental landmasses (including […]
The artistic reconstruction of palaeoenvironments
Life on Earth has been affected and shaped by geological and astronomical events during the 4.5 billion years since it was formed. Scientists study geological and palaeontological processes to answer some rather fundamental questions. What […]
Triassic reptiles from the Lower Muschelkalk of Winterswijk
The Lower Muschelkalk (from the Anisian age of the Middle Triassic) of the quarry at Winterswijk in The Netherlands is well known for its beautiful and sometimes abundant finds of reptile footprints and bones. A […]
Dinocochlea: a solution to the mysterious spiral of Hastings
Last week, we introduced Dinocochlea ingens, a gigantic spiral fossil from the Lower Cretaceous Wadhurst Clay Formation of Hastings, Sussex. Discovered in 1921 during the extension of St Helens Road near Old Roar Glen, this […]
Dinocochlea: the mysterious spiral of Hastings
Spiral structures in nature hold a particular fascination on account of their beautiful yet twisted symmetry. The logarithmic spiral coiling of ammonite shells and rams’ horns, the corkscrew helix of a plant tendril, and the […]
