How Did Duckbill Dinosaurs Get to Morocco?  I came across THIS ARTICLE and found it intriguing. Duckbilled dinosaurs are a North American family and they live on land. You can't walk from North America to Morocco. They developed long after the break up of Pangea North American duckbills are large, the earliest Moroccan ones are small, but they got bigger later. (Geology speak here: later means millennia.) There are duckbills in Europe, the article does not discuss how they got there. But you could not walk from Europe to Africa at that time - the distance was greater then than ..read more

 Anthropocene - the Ongoing Story The Anthropocene Working Group recently decided not to recognise the existence of the Anthropocene - much to the disgust of some members of the group - see HERE. If the Anthropocene had been recognised it would have marked the end of the Holocene, the current geological epoch, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the Younger Dryas. There has been much discussion about when the putative Anthropocene would be deemed to start. I had a strange wish to straddle two Geological Epochs!  The wish for the new epoch has a great deal to do wit ..read more

 Earliest Forest in the World in Devon and Somerset A correspondent sent me the link to THIS ARTICLE, for which I am very grateful. The article is based on THIS PAPER. The papers concern newly discovered fossil trees found in Middle Devonian sandstones in the Hangman Sandstone Formation which is of Eifelian age (393 - 387 million years). Not only were fossilised trees found but also forests. The trees are of an extinct species related to ferns and horsetails - the cladoxylopsids, which look rather like palm trees - long stem (2 - 4m) with "leaves" like palm fronds at the top. (Here "leav ..read more

 Down to Earth Extra March 2024 The March 2024 edition of Down to Earth Extra has been published. You can download it HERE or you can read it below ..read more

 Predicting Volcanism in Iceland It seems appropriate that the people in charge of predicting eruptions in Iceland work in the Meteorological Office. In Iceland, volcanism is like the weather, there is a lot of it and you can't prevent it but you can give forecasts which are very useful. THIS ARTICLE in Quanta Magazine is an interesting review of what has happened recently on, and in, the Reykjanes Peninsula of south west Iceland. It seems that there may be several centuries of volcanism to look forward to in the area. What is evident is that what could have been a deadly catastrophe be ..read more

 Pterosaur from Skye There has been a lot lately in the media about a pterosaur from Skye. It is based on research, much of which was done at Bristol University. The main academic paper can be seen HERE, the Bristol researcher writes about it HERE and the BBC writes about it HERE. The fossil in question was found in 2006 at the location shown on the map below. The fossil took much preparation and was examined in Bristol University's CT scanner. The bones are thin and fragile and the rock matrix hard so getting to the stage of examining the bones took a long t ..read more

 Looking at Early Life A sample of chert rock containing what may be the remains of microorganisms that lived 3.4 billion years ago. Dr. Manuel Reinhardt Around 3.4 billion years ago, Earth hosted diverse communities of life, as evidenced by exceptionally preserved remains revealing a microorganism ecosystem with various sustenance methods. The complexity of this ancient ecosystem suggests that life had likely existed for hundreds of millions of years, starting early in Earth's history. THIS ACADEMIC PAPER, focused on rocks from the Buck Reef Chert in South Africa, dating back 3.42 ..read more

 Earth Heritage, Issue 60, Winter 2024 The Winter 2024 issue of Earth Heritage is available for download on THIS PAGE. Or you can read it below ..read more

 I Won't Live Forever Because of the Dinosaurs! Mammals were at the bottom of the food chain when dinosaurs were the top predators and therefore to survive mammals became small, nocturnal and short-lived. They had to reproduce rapidly and did not need processes and genes related to long life such as repair and regeneration. The same cannot be said for reptiles, amphibians and fish. They die from being eaten, not from old age! Many of these continue to reproduce throughout their lives. I read about this fascinating subject in THIS ARTICLE.  ..read more

Dolomite - Solved?  Many old rocks are dolomite, younger ones are seldom dolomite - why?  There has been some activity in the dolomite field which shows that you can grow dolomite in the laboratory relatively quickly by repeatedly washing the growing crystal.  (Dolomite crystals have layers of calcium, carbonate, magnesium, endlessly repeated. In the rocks there is no magnesium in the calcium layers and no calcium in the magnesium layers. Up to now this was impossible to replicate in the laboratory.) The original paper which tells how to make dolomite is HERE. And "popular" r ..read more