Fossils, geology and minerals. Highly acclaimed international earth science blog with over 850 articles and book reviews.
Jack Wilkin (UK) Climate sceptics often argue that, because the climate has changed in the past, contemporary global warming must therefore also be natural. However, in this context, paleoclimatologists study the causes and effects of climate change throughout geological time to better understand human-induced (anthropogenic) warming. And it is this … Read More
Niles Laurids Viby (Denmark) I have written a few articles for this magazine on specific formations here in Denmark. However, a lot of local fossil collecting is done simply by walking along the seashore. Some beaches are fronted by cliffs – and some of those are base rock, like the … Read More
P Formanoy and HJ Ahrens (The Netherlands) De Kuilen is a wet sandpit forming a lake and recreational area located near the small village of Langenboom, about 15 miles south of Nijmegen, in the eastern part of the Dutch province of Noord-Brabant (Fig. 1). Among fossil collectors, the site is … Read More
Steve Koppes (USA) When he was still a high school student in Florida, Christian Kammerer turned his unusually keen, critical eye to reports about some enigmatic new synapsid fossils from Russia. He wondered — had the discoverers of these bizarre, mammal-like reptiles misinterpreted their finds? Kammerer shot off an email … Read More
Dr Ross Barnett and Simon Sylvester In Zoology, nothing is more exciting than the rediscovery of an animal previously thought long extinct. The coelacanth (Latimera chalumnae) and the ivory-bill woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) are two famous recent examples of ‘Lazarus’ taxa. Well-publicised rediscoveries like these promote the idea that refugia containing … Read More
Neale Monks (UK) The West Somerset coastline, between Blue Anchor and Lilstock, exposes an almost complete succession of strata from the latest Triassic well into the Early Jurassic (Fig. 1). Fossils are abundant throughout, mostly invertebrates such as ammonites, brachiopods and oysters, but also with vertebrate remains at certain horizons. … Read More
Michael D Johnson It has now been 63 years since a huge iron meteorite impacted the Sikhote-Alin Mountains of the former USSR. Imagine what it must have been like on that cold morning of 12 February 1947 – the tremendous smoke trail, the thunderous crash and the roaring sound it … Read More
Deborah Painter (USA) The famed English explorer of the “New World”, Captain John Smith, led expeditions during the early 1600s to create charts and plan settlements along the east coast of the United States, from what is now Virginia to Maryland and, on a subsequent voyage, New England. Smith’s map … Read More
Chris Retzlaff (USA) The Redhill Ridge area in Park County, Colorado is a hogback composed of Dakota Sandstone. This fine-grained, Cretaceous sediment – near the town of Fairplay – contains trace fossils (Figs. 1 and 2) that help palaeontologists understand what the environment was like there, more than 65 million … Read More
Rob Hope (Franc) I worked over several summer seasons as a museum assistant and bilingual guide in the karstic cavern system of Soyons, in France’s rocky Ardéche region. Here, seven large caves hide a fantastic kaleidoscope of ancient organic reminders from the later shadows of the Pleistocene (Quaternary). Running parallel … Read More
Dr Trevor Watts Barrow Hill (Fig. 1) is a little gem. It is virtually unknown, very accessible and in the middle of a large town – Dudley, in the West Midlands of England. Nowadays, it is almost swallowed up in the western suburbs of Birmingham (Fig. 2). A brief summary … Read More
Dean Lomax (UK) Dr Dean Lomax is now well known from his books, television appearances and especially for his work on marine reptiles. However, before all this, he wrote this article for Issue 21 of Deposits. After returning from a long summer working in the USA at the Wyoming Dinosaur … Read More
In many ways, this updated guide is exactly what I want from a GA guide – extensive coverage, well written, and oodles of colourful photos and graphics. I liked and used the previous edition (GA No. 2), and it’s a shame that, for example, the Ordovician site of Stockdale Quarry has disappeared, but it – and no doubt other locations – has been replaced by, what I suspect, are just as good, if not better, sites.
Neale Monks (UK) Not many palaeontologists would go on a field trip to the Houses of Parliament in London, but if you do something similar in the state of Nebraska, you will be surprised to find a whole variety of prehistoric life, including dinosaurs (Fig. 1), ammonites and trilobites. The … Read More
This is something of a departure for me, as this book is really about biodiversity rather than geology. However, you won’t be surprised to learn that this book certainly does involve geology, as its context is locations from large caves to small gaps in ground. And given that, for example, bio-stratigraphy involves evolution and extinction, this book really covers both in the raw – and these are all things that geologist and palaeontologists are involved with all the time.
Rosalind Jones On the Hebridean island of Mull, on a day just before 1850, when potato famine and clearances brought misery to the Highlands and Islands, a man (perhaps collecting shellfish to stave off starvation) ventured down into a wind-swept gully on the Ross of Mull. Known as Slochd an … Read More
John A Cooper (UK) The legacy of Gideon Mantell’s fossil collection, sold to the British Museum in 1833, would have been so much more significant to Brighton had he been successful in establishing a permanent Sussex scientific institute to house it. In his article, Gideon Mantel and the dinosaur relic, … Read More
Fiona Henderson and Evelyn Krull (Australia) Biochar has the potential to sequester carbon, improve soil health and increase crop yield. Even its production can be classed as beneficial, as it is a by-product of a process that burns waste materials to produce bio-fuel. However, questions remain. Although biochar offers an … Read More
Stephen Lautenschlager (Germany) The Lower Jurassic Posidonia Shale Formation of Southern Germany belongs to one of the most famous fossil lagerstätten in the world. Its sediments – finely laminated marly claystones – were deposited in a shallow, inland (epicontinental) sea, the Tethys Ocean, under tropical conditions. The dark grey colour … Read More
Rob Hope (France) A break from work, and also from reading about the history of palaeontology, enabled me to get away for a while. And a chance visit to the south of England found me driving through the lovely Sussex town of Lewes. Held up by a red light, I … Read More
Dick Mol (Netherlands) and Ralf-Dietrich Kahlke (Germany) The remains of four mammoth bulls have been discovered in southern Spain. They lived about 30 to 40 thousand years ago near Padul, a small city in today’s Granada. These are Europe’s most southerly skeletal remains of Mammuthus primigenius (Fig. 1) and were … Read More
Deborah Painter (USA) The breezes from the estuarine Pamlico Sound, which reach the tiny coastal town of Aurora, North Carolina in the USA along a meandering tributary, sometimes carry the evocative and not unpleasant ambiance of salt, mixed with decomposed estuarine life, such as fish, clams, crabs and other “shellfish”. … Read More
Dr G Trevor Watts In the fisrt part of this article (KratataAn excursion to Krakatau (Part 1)), I started to describe the geology of this famous volcano and also my visit to it. I now continue and you find me on fresh scoria and sulphurous steaming rock, standing on the … Read More
Dr G Trevor Watts (UK) Some researchers credit a major eruption of Krakatau (or Krakatoa, if you prefer) in the middle of the sixth century with the triggering the Dark Ages (Figs. 1 and 2). Whether or not this is true, the volcano was certainly responsible for about 36,000 deaths … Read More
Henk Oosterink (The Netherlands) Ichnofossils are the non-body remains of organisms. This group of fossils includes burrows, borings, tracks and any other trace formed by the life activity of organisms. They are very important in determining the ecology of extinct organism – although it is not always possible to link … Read More
Stephen K Donovan (the Netherlands) and John WM Jagt (the Netherlands) A fossil is a mine of information about just one specimen of one species and many such specimens represent extinct species. Consequently, no observations of the living organism are possible – everything we know about that species will have … Read More
Dick Mol (The Netherlands), Evangelos Vlachos (Argentina), Spyridoula Pappa (UK), Nikos Vasileiadis (Greece), Nikos Bacharidis (Greece), Vassilis Makridis (Greece), Evangelia Tsoukala (Greece) Over the past 30 years, systematic excavations by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Northern Greece have unearthed many Proboscidea fossils, including the longest tusks in the world … Read More
Neale Monks Although rarely conspicuous, echinoids – commonly known as sea urchins – are among the most important invertebrates in the sea. They are often very numerous and, in particular, the herbivorous species can be critically important as the grazers that keep large seaweed species, such as kelp, from taking … Read More
Imran A Rahman (UK) Fossils can provide unique insights into the history of life on Earth, which stretches back nearly four billion years. Unfortunately, the closest living relatives of fossil organisms are sometimes unclear and, therefore, their evolutionary significance may not (yet) have been fully realised. Such fossils are called … Read More
Főzy István (Hungary) Csillaghegy (literally translated, “Star Hill”) is a suburb in the northern part of Budapest, the capital of Hungary. It is home to a waterfront promenade with stunning views of the Danube and the elegant, cable-stayed Megyeri Bridge that crosses Szentendre Island. The riverside is home to kayak … Read More
