‘Fabulous Fossils’ exhibition at Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery
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
Book review: Geologists’ Association Guide No. 77 – Cumbria, compiled and edited by Richard Wrigley
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that, for example, the Ordovician site of Stockdale Quarry has disappeared, but it – and no doubt other locations – has been replaced by, what I suspect, are just as good, if not better, sites.
Dinosaurs at the Nebraska State Capitol
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
Book review: Cave Biodiversity: Speciation and Diversity of Subterranean Fauna, by J Judson Wynne (author and editor)
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.
Mull’s famous leaf beds
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
More on the dinosaurs of the Booth Museum, Brighton
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
Biochar – what is it and why is it generating so much interest?
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
Shining white ammonites: remarkably preserved ammonites from the Posidonia Shales of Southern Germany
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
Gideon Mantel and the dinosaur relic
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
Climate events let ice age mammoths go far below 40°N
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
A tiny waterfront town’s Big Fossil Festival
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
Krakatau – Part 2
Dr G Trevor Watts In the fisrt part of this article (Kratatau – 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 rim of … Read More
Krakatau – Part 1
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
Diversity of trace fossils from the Anisian (Middle Triassic) of Winterswijk, the Netherlands
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
Fossil sea urchins as hard substrates
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
Proboscidean tusks through time: a special case of excavation and displaying experience
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
Echinoids
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
Deciphering carpoids – fossil ‘problematica’
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
The vampire of Csillaghegy
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
The mastodon of Milia – the longest tusks in the world
Dick Mol and Wilrie van Logchem (The Netherlands) Parts of a skeleton of a Pliocene mastodon were excavated near the village of Milia in West Macedonia, Greece, between 17 and 29 July 2007. Members of the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, together with the authors, unearthed the specimens in a sandpit, … Read More
How soil science helps solve crime
Liz Porter (Australia) Australia has 14 different major types of soil. Maps showing soil profiles of different areas are very useful for farmers, people planning cities, people who look after natural resources and increasingly … forensic scientists! The foray into the world of crime solving by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and … Read More
Cerro Negro
Dr G Trevor Watts (UK) Cerro Negro (The Black Hill) is a stark, lively little volcano. Little known outside Nicaragua, it is easily accessible from the city of Léon and well worth the effort of the hike of about a thousand feet up. Location Cerro Negro is about 30km east-north-east … Read More
Mali’s many minerals
Deborah Painter (USA) Mali is frequently associated with the Tuareg rebel insurgents, poverty and the desertification we see in the 2023 news items about the country. I also think of Mali in terms of the healthy recipes using fish, green pepper, sorghum, spinach, rice, peanut butter, and other ingredients in … Read More
Prehistoric Beasts, by Dean Lomax and Mike Love
If you have ever wondered what a penguin’s great, great, great, great, great (and so on, for a very long, long time) grandparent looked like, then this is the book for you. Better still, if you are five to nine years old, it is certainly the one for you.
Amber deposits of the Dominican Republic’s northern cordillera
George Burden (Canada) The rickety taxi bumped and rattled its way southward, into the scenic peaks of the Dominican Republic’s northern cordillera. Frequent washouts from seasonal torrential rains make the going tricky and, at times, even a little perilous. However, we finally arrived at a small community, the site of … Read More
Riccardo Levi-Setti: Experimental physicist and trilobite expert
Steve Koppes (USA) Although he is an experimental physicist who discovered new elementary particles in the early 1950s and invented the high-resolution scanning ion microprobe, Riccardo Levi-Setti also is known in paleontological circles for co-discovering a giant trilobite subspecies and for his book, Trilobites. Decades ago, as a diversion, Levi-Setti … Read More
Thiepval Memorial
Flavia Faedo (UK) The Thiepval Memorial is situated four miles (almost 6.5km) north of the town of Albert, in northern France, and was built to commemorate British soldiers who have no known grave, yet died here during the Great War of 1914-1918. This memorial rises majestically from the woods and, … Read More
The forgotten women in UK geoscience
Megan Jacobs (UK) The history of geosciencein the UK is heavily dominated by men, with eminent figures such as Sir Richard Owen, Charles Lyell, William Buckland and Gideon Mantell famed for making many big advances in the early days of the science. However, in the background were powerful and intelligent … Read More
Book review: Islands in Deep Time: Ancient Landscapes Lost and Found, by Markes E Johnson
I approached this book with what turned out to be completely irrelevant preconceptions. I was very wrong. In fact, this is a little geological tour de force describing field locations and, what one reviewer described as “the logic of geology: how vanished land – and seascapes can be conjured back into existence from the raw rock record”.