Fossils, geology and minerals. Highly acclaimed international earth science blog with over 850 articles and book reviews.
Bob Williams (UK) I developed a passion for crystals while collecting fossils. To me, crystals don’t have to be fancy, rare or expensive to be of immense interest. Even a good specimen of the commonly encountered “fools gold” (iron pyrite, more technically referred to as iron sulphide) will be of … Read More
Dr Neale Monks (UK) So far our essential collectibles have been invertebrate fossils, remains of animals without backbones such as ammonites and trilobites. Vertebrate fossils are much rarer, and consequently more expensive, the pocket money-priced ones tending to be things like sharks’ teeth or small fragments of reptile bone. Certainly, … Read More
Dr Steve Koppes (USA) Hikers visiting the Kilauea Iki crater in Hawaii today walk along a mostly flat surface of sparsely vegetated basalt. It looks like parking lot asphalt, but, in November and December 1959, it emitted the orange glow of newly erupted lava. Now, a precision analysis of lava … Read More
‘Introducing Natural Resources’ is the latest in the Dunedin Academic Press series of introductions to scientific subjects, in particular, the earth sciences. You will probably be aware that I have positively reviewed a large number of them for this magazine, and this new guide is no different.
Dr Neale Monks (UK) Gastropods, or snails, are common fossils thanks to their strong, easily preserved external shells. Quite a few fossil gastropods are traded commercially, including members of the genus Turritella. This particular genus first appears in the fossil record during the mid Cretaceous and includes many species still … Read More
Mark Witton (UK) Planet Earth was a busy place 225Ma. The super-continent, Pangaea, in the Northern Hemisphere started rifting, creating the beginnings of the North Atlantic Ocean. Dinosaurs began their campaign for global dominance of Mesozoic terrestrial ecosystems and drove many older reptile lineages into extinction. In the seas, enormous … Read More
The Geologists’ Association have extended their excellent series of geological guides by producing what some people (including me) would think at first was a slightly self-indulgent couple of volumes on ‘Devonshire Marbles’.
Dr Neale Monks (UK) Orthocone nautiloids, loosely referred to as Orthoceras in the trade, are another type of fossil exported from Morocco in large numbers, like the Diacalymene trilobites discussed earlier in this series. Both their common and scientific names refer to the long, narrow, conical shape of their shell, … Read More
Rosalind Jones (France) “Time and tide wait for no man” and “truth is often stranger than fiction.” Both these sayings apply to Scotland, especially Argyll with its islands at ‘the edge of the world’. Here, historic stones – some truly associated with destiny, others more dubiously linked by legend – … Read More
Dr Neale Monks (UK) One of the most interesting aspects of fossil collecting is learning about the folklore attached to them, and few fossils rival Gryphaea when it comes to this sort of thing. Known as ‘devil’s toenails’ because of their curves and gnarly shape, during medieval times they were … Read More
Landis Wofford (USA) Like all mountains, the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee are the result of the action of plate tectonics. The crust of our planet is composed of five primary plates, or huge pieces of rock that move very slowly over deeper layers of … Read More
Dr Neale Monks (UK) Alongside trilobites, ammonites are among the ‘must haves’ in any palaeontological collection. Professional geologists value them as among the best index fossils, many species having only existed for a relatively brief period of time (often a few tens of thousands of years) but in that time … Read More
Trevor Devon (UK) Slovakia is situated at the north-western end of the Carpathian Mountains, a region well-known for its metal ore mines and quarries. One of the Sussex Mineralogical Society’s members had been a schoolteacher in Slovakia and had explored many of its mineral locations. Through his contacts there, an … Read More
Dr Neale Monks (UK). In this series of articles we’re going to be looking at those fossils many people buy rather than collect. This doesn’t mean they’re less interesting of course, but because of the way they’re acquired hobbyists often don’t know much about them beyond what they are and … Read More
Niels Laurids Viby (Denmark) I didn’t go to Florida especially to look for fossils, but I am always looking for opportunities when I am abroad. Being an architect, I actually went there to study houses, in particular, the Art Deco district at Ocean Drive in Miami. However, it seems that … Read More
David Bone (UK) “I have been greatly disappointed … [owing to] sand, sometimes two to three feet in thickness, or the tide not leaving the shore sufficiently exposed; so that a stranger might conclude that there were no fossils to be procured at Bracklesham”. The Sussex geologist, Frederick Dixon, writing … Read More
Richard Edmonds (UK) Between Seatown and Eype, on the West Dorset coast (part of the Dorset and East Devon Coast World Heritage Site), there is a remarkable layer of rock known as the Eype Starfish Bed. This is famous for exquisitely brittle starfish (brittlestars) fossils that are usually preserved on … Read More
Charlie Smart (Scotland) Today, the villages of Wanlockhead and Leadhills (the highest in Scotland) are probably best known for the centuries of toil that gave them the most productive lead mines in Scotland. However, it was the search for gold during the sixteenth century that revealed the abundance and richness … Read More
Charles Underwood (UK) Fossil sites are generally the result of happy coincidence. It may be that this is the result of natural processes, when the sea or a river has eroded into cliffs of fossil bearing rocks. It could also be the result of human activity, where a quarry opened … Read More
Neale Monks (UK) Ammonites have been studied intensively for the last 200 years but, between experts, there is very little agreement on what ammonites looked like or how they worked as living organisms. Could they float? Did they swim? How did they catch their food? How long did they live? … Read More
Tim Ball (Canada) Those who I refer to as ‘the new deniers’ keep trying to repair the infamous climate “hockey stick”. This is a term coined for a chart of temperature variation over the last 1,000 years, which suggests a recent sharp rise in temperature caused by human activities. The … Read More
Dr Ross Barnett (UK) The lion (Panthera leo) can rightly claim to be the most oft-invoked animal in all of human culture. Whether praising someone as leonine or lion-hearted, or throwing them to the lions, the second largest of felines has the ability to evoke emotions that the tiger (Panthera … Read More
Stephen K Donovan (The Netherlands) Building stones may tell us something or nothing about the geology of the local area. As Ted Nield (2014) recently highlighted in his book, Underlands, stones used in Britain today are rarely local. Once upon a time, local stone would have been derived from a … Read More
For anyone like me who finds the immensity of geological time (‘deep time’) both fascinating and fundamentally difficult – both emotionally and intellectually – this is a great book.
Dr Neale Monks (UK) While they can be found in many other parts of the British Isles, Scotland is uniquely associated with Palaeozoic fossil fishes. That Scotland’s fossil fishes are so well known is largely thanks to a remarkable man from Caithness, called Hugh Miller. Where scholars had dismissed the … Read More
Robert Sturm (Austria) Microfossils, such as foraminifera, diatoms, ostracods and conodonts, are usually studied using a magnifying glass or under a stereo-microscope. However, nannofossils, such as coccoliths – with sizes measured in micrometres – are way beyond the resolving power of these optical tools. In general, coccoliths are very regularly … Read More
Dean Lomax and Jon Trevelyan (UK) By the early nineteenth century, geology in England had started to appeal to the public at large. For instance, in 1824 the Reverend William Buckland of Oxford University named the first dinosaur (Megalosaurus bucklandii) and, after this, it seems that this awe inspiring group … Read More
Dunedin Academic Press has once again added a title to its series of introductions to scientific subjects. As you will probably be aware, in the past, I have positively reviewed a large number of them for this magazine. This one is a short introduction to an essential subject to any budding geologist .
Steven Wade Veatch (USA) Quartz (SiO2) is a common mineral found in all three classes of rocks (igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary), in many environments and in a range of colours. However, rose and blue quartz are less common than some of the other varieties. This article discussed these two extraordinary … Read More
Neale Monks (UK) The handful of nautilus species found in seas today are small, retiring animals that scavenge about at night, foraging for carrion and crustacean moults. However, nautiluses were not always so insignificant and, during the first half of the Palaeozoic Era especially, nautiluses were major predators, occupying the … Read More
