Fossils, geology and minerals. Highly acclaimed international earth science blog with over 850 articles and book reviews.
Biddy Jarzembowski, Neil Watson and Ed Jarzembowski (UK) This is the third part of the mini-series in which selected Early Cretaceous insects from the Wealden of Southern England are restored in colour for the first time. The aim is to give a visual idea of the variety of British insect … Read More
Sea level change is something that probably everyone who does their best to keep up to date about climate change, thinks they know about and on which they will have an opinion.
Biddy Jarzembowski, Neil Watson and Ed Jarzembowski (UK) This collection of illustrations, the second in the series, continues with seven more watercolour insects from the Wealden. Further reading English Wealden fossils, Palaeontological Association Field Guide to Fossils No 14, edited by David J Batten, The Palaeontological Association, London (2011), 769 … Read More
Deborah Painter (USA) The island of Greenland is now an independent nation called Kalaallit Nunaat in the language of the native-born people. Almost totally covered in ice, the world’s largest island can be compared to a bowl of ice having a rim of ice-free hills and mountains. The southern tip … Read More
Biddy Jarzembowski, Neil Watson and Ed Jarzembowski (UK) Fossil arthropods carry their skeletons on the outsides of their bodies. These exoskeletons may not only be preserved in the fossil record, but also the colour patterns that once adorned them. Therefore, the reconstruction and restoration of the appearance of fossil insects … Read More
Jack Wilkin (UK) Belemnites are an extinct group of cephalopods that first appeared during the Triassic and became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period. Their closest living relatives are squid and cuttlefish. Belemnites, unlike modern squids, have a hard bullet-shaped calcified internal skeleton consisting of three parts: a … Read More
Stephen K Donovan (The Netherlands) The Mississippian (Lower Carboniferous) is often referred to as the ‘Age of Crinoids’. Historically, the best collecting area for fossil crinoids in the Carboniferous Limestone of the British Isles has been Clitheroe, in Lancashire. The late Stanley Westhead, who lived in Clitheroe, rightly claimed that: … Read More
“When he returned from his voyage, Darwin was already known to its leaders [of all the scientific societies of the metropolis] as a young geologist of great promise, owing to the geological letters he had sent home from South America” (Rudwick 1982, p. 190) This is the second of two … Read More
Jon Trevelyan (UK) Professor Robert Diffendal Jr’s little guidebook to the Great Plains of the USA makes for a fascinating read for an Englishman like me, who has never been there (but wants to). As he says in his article Great Plains geology: A personal journey, they rarely correspond to … Read More
Alan R Lord (Germany) Palaeontological Association Field Guide to Fossils: Number 15 As the editor of this new publication by the Palaeontological Association (see Palaeontological Association Field Guide to Fossils Number 15: Fossils from the Lias of the Yorkshire Coast), I think that it may be time to explain why … Read More
Tony Waltham (UK) This article accompanies a book review of Tony Waltham’s book, The World of Geology. The text is broadly taken from the book itself. The world of geology is the world as we know it, that we see and that we live on. It is all about the … Read More
This is a lovely example of photographs used to inspire and text to explain. For many years, Dr Tony Waltham has produced a photo plus explanatory text for the back cover of the glossy magazine, Geology Today.
Matt Salusbury and Tim-Holt Wilson (UK) “The Wonder of Our Times: Being the True and Exactly Relation of the Body of a Mighty giant dig’d up at Brockford Bridge neer Ipswich in the county of Suffolk.” That’s the title of a printed pamphlet from 1651, now in the Thomason Collection … Read More
Jon Trevelyan (UK) Those of you with a long memory (and an admirable loyalty to Deposits magazine) may remember that, several years ago, I produced a few articles on British geology museums, including the National Stone Centre in Derbyshire and Whitby Museum (the latter jointly with Dean Lomax). I have … Read More
This is a new edition of the classic little guide on Blue John by Trevor Ford, who has now sadly passed away. The guide provides a comprehensive overview of the geology and mineralogy of Blue John fluorite from Derbyshire and also provides a description of its mining in the past and today, and its use in the production of ornaments and jewellery.
Mervyn Jones (UK) GA field meeting on 6 and 7 April 2019 This field meeting was the second following the publication of Prof Cope’s GA Guide No 73, Geology of the South Devon Coast (reviewed in Issue 51 of Deposits), the companion to GA Guide No 22, Geology of the … Read More
Chris Duffin (UK) The Hortus Sanitatis (1491) On 23 June 1491, a new volume was printed and bound for distribution in the German University town of Mainz. The publisher was Jacob von Meydenbach, who might also have been responsible for compiling many of the entries in the book. The volume … Read More
Steven Wade Veatch (USA) This photograph, taken around 1899, shows my ancestors posing at their modest frame home, where they lived one step away from Cripple Creek’s gold rush world of cardplayers, whisky drinkers, and midnight carousers. The scene depicts my great-grandfather (Robert Pickering Plews), my great-grandmother (Janet Plews), and … Read More
Just a couple of days before the Covid-19 lockdown, I was with friends at Tidmoor Point collecting wonderful pyrite ammonites from the Oxford Clay with this excellent guide to the South Dorset Coast.
This is a very ambitious work. The authors discuss the geology of Britain as a “geological legacy”, that is, they believe it is “an inheritance bequeathed to 11 millennia or so of its post-glacial inhabitants”.
Stephen K Donovan and Werner de Gier (The Netherlands) “The talk [between Nero Wolfe and Lon Cohen] had covered the state of the Union, the state of the feminine mind, whether any cooked oyster can be fit to eat, structural linguistics, and the prices of books” (Stout, 1975, p. 13). … Read More
I have written many admiring reviews of Dunedin’s books, and this is another one. OK – I like fossils, but it is always nice to have a brief but informative guide to the actual science behind one’s finds.
Andy Gale’s update of his guide to the Isle of Wight (this is the sixth edition) is an important change to an already excellent geological guide. The Geologists’ Association has been updating several of its guides – using a modern format, and providing better colour pictures and diagrams – and this is another great example.
As this book explains, ground conditions for building depend on the history of all these aspects in connection with both the actual building site and the surrounding area. In fact, the book goes into some detail, using colour photographs and block geomodels, to bring the subject to life in what is, I suspect, a somewhat fresh way.
Dr David Penney, founder and owner of the excellent Siri Scientific Press (whose books I have frequently reviewed in this magazine), has writen about Miocene spider inclusions in amber from deposits of the Dominican Republic.
I reviewed some excellent previous guides in this series (Classic Geology in Europe 3: Iceland in Issue 39 and Classic Geology in Europe 12: Almeria in Issue 48), but this one is closer to home and covers an area that I have fond memories of from my Munro-bagging days.
I love the Highlands of Scotland and I am proud to say that I have climbed many of the mountains covered in the glossy hardback. But, as I say in the other book review on this page, it is more than a picture book. It contains some excellent and fascinating science explaining their outstanding beauty.
‘Sedimentary Structures’ is definitely written for professional earth scientists (but also students and non-specialists from other subject areas, where an understanding of the origin and forms of structures in sediments and sedimentary rocks would be invaluable).
This new guide in Dunedin’s ‘Introducing …’ range of books, covering the branch of geology that studies rock layers (strata) and layering (stratification), primarily in sedimentary rocks, but also layered igneous rocks.
So, PalAss has published another of its excellent field guides, this time to the fossils from the Lias of the Yorkshire coast. Readers of this magazine will know that I have a soft spot for these guides.
