An acclaimed international collection of earth science articles and book reviews on palaeontology, geology, minerals and more
Rosalind Jones (France) In Part 1 (Mull’s famous fossil tree (Part 1): Chrissie and the tree), I described the events surrounding the unique fossilisation of an Eocene redwood tree in Mull’s famous Staffa suite of volcanic rocks. In this part, I will take you on a walk to the fossil … Read More
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nouvelle-Aquitaine (New Aquitaine) is a vast region of southwest France covering more than 30,000 square miles. Between 1154 and the end of the Hundred Years War in 1453, much of the region was under British control. Links with Britain are still strong today, both through tourism and the large ex-patriate British population, particularly in the Dordogne, known jokingly to locals as ‘Dordogneshire’.
Dr Sebastian Lüning (Germany) I am a geologist by profession. Everyday of my working life, I have worked with rocks, from nine to five, for 19 years, looking for oil and gas in the Sahara. Sometimes this is stressful, sometimes really enjoyable and sometimes simply annoying – just like any … Read More
The is a second edition of Prof John Cope’s excellent geological guide to the Dorset coast for the Geologists’ Association (GA). It is slightly shorter than the first edition, with some minor corrections and some of the figures revised, together with new photographs.
Jens Lehmann (Germany) Despite their common name ‘sea lilies’, crinoids are animals but not plants, although they look like a flower (Fig. 1). They are related to the sea urchins, sea cucumbers and starfish, groups that are unified as echinoderms (see, for example, Broadhead and Waters, 1980). Crinoids consist of … Read More
Chris Mays and Stephen McLoughlin (Sweden) In the aftermath of Earth’s greatest biotic crisis 251.9 million years ago – the end-Permian mass extinction – a group of plants arose that would come to dominate the flora of the Southern Hemisphere. Recovery of the vegetation from the end-Permian crisis was slow; … Read More
Khursheed Dinshaw (India) The Akal Wood Fossil Park is located about 18km from the desert city of Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, India. It has preserved fossil evidence dating back to the Jurassic Period (Fig. 6) indicating a hot and humid climate characterised by dense forests. In particular, 180-million-year-old fossils of animals … Read More
Stephen K Donovan (The Netherlands) and David AT Harper (UK) The most obvious manifestations of geological materials in the urban environment are building and facing stones, and similar rocks used in street furniture, such as kerbstones. As a Londoner, SKD was impressed as a boy by the massive kerbstones that … Read More
Matúš Hyžný (Slovakia), Andreas Kroh (Austria), Alexander Ziegler (Germany) and John WM Jagt (The Netherlands) Alpheid shrimps, colloquially referred to as “pistol shrimps”, exhibit a remarkable anatomical adaptation. These tiny marine crustaceans use their enlarged and highly modified claw to ‘shoot’ at their prey – hence their name. It is … Read More
Mats E Eriksson (Sweden) A hellish monstrosity of an animal – like a beastly entity taken straight out of your worst nightmare – has come to sculptural life. And it has Death Metal, primordial life and Alex Webster written all over it. Last year, a new gigantic fossil polychaete worm … Read More
Stephen K Donovan (The Netherlands) Much of the secondary railway route in Derbyshire, from Buxton south to Ashbourne, was closed in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, only the northern section is still in use as a railway, providing a route for major limestone quarry traffic (Roberts and Emerson, 2018). But … Read More
Biddy and Ed Jarzembowski (UK) An ‘artist’s impression’ of Wealden insects, inspired by the original work of Neil Watson, appeared in a three-part mini-series in Deposits issues 47 to 49. Since then, the discovery of a number of species new to science (belonging to diverse groups) has meant that an … Read More
Anthonie Hellemond (Belgium) Spiders represent the most diverse group of obligate predators (that is, predators that feed solely on other animals) in terrestrial ecosystems today, with almost 48,000 extant species in 118 families described to date. The number increases annually by approximately 500 species as a result of new discoveries … Read More
Steven Wade Veatch (USA) In a breath of inspiration in 1830, English geologist, Henry De la Beche (1796–1855), while exploring new intellectual territories in the emerging fields of palaeontology, painted Duria Antiquior (meaning “a more ancient Dorset”), a representation of a prehistoric Dorset coast. De la Beche’s work was ground … Read More
