Here is a collection of creepy-crawlies I saw in South Africa: Big grasshopper/katydid orthopteran: Another big orthopteran (“locust”?), obviously beefier than the previous one: Beach roach (Blattodea): Mating true bugs (hemipterans): Here’s a big snail, too: And best of all? This solpugid! Solpugids are arachnids, but they are not spiders. Along with vinegaroons, scorpions, pseudoscorpions, … Read more
Elephant shrew Epauletted fruit bat Savannah baboon Vervet monkey Scrub hare Tree squirrel Woodland (?) dormouse Unidentified rat Cape porcupine (as roadkill only) Black-backed jackal Wild dog Banded mongoose Dwarf mongoose Small-spotted genet Spotted hyena African wild cat Lion Leopard African elephant Rock hyrax (dassie) Plains zebra Square-lipped (white) rhinoceros Common warthog Hippopotamus Giraffe African … Read more
Callan reviews the geology of the superlatively auriferous Witwatersrand Supergroup of South Africa, and then zooms in on a distinctive marker bed near the base of the sequence. The deformation in this particular banded iron formation (BIF) is an aesthetic wonder, as this suite of images reveal. The layer outcrops in the heart of urban Johannesburg.
Here’s my species list for the past three weeks: African penguin Cape gannet Bunch of gulls (didn’t bother differentiating them) Bunch of terns (didn’t bother differentiating them) Cape cormorant Reed cormorant White-breasted cormorant Cattle egret Little egret Grey heron Saddle-billed stork Marabou stork White stork Woolly-necked stork Hammerkop Greater flamingo African spoonbill African sacred ibis … Read more
Scops owl, Kruger National Park, South Africa Hi everyone! I’m back in the States. There will be more photos of wildlife and geology from South Africa to come in the days and weeks ahead, but this little fellow can be an appetizer for you. It was a great trip, but it also feels good to … Read more
While I was away in South Africa, both Brian Romans of Clastic Detritus and Evelyn Mervine of Georneys posted pictures of folds in quartzite of the Cape Fold Belt in southern South Africa. Well, I’m not going to be left out. Here’s a belated Friday fold for December 23, showing a bunch of sweet folds … Read more
Folded & boudinaged granite dikes in tonalitic gneiss, Barberton granite-greenstone belt, South Africa. From Passchier, CW, Myers, JS, and Kroner, A., (1990). FIELD GEOLOGY OF HIGH GRADE GNEISS TERRANES. Very crudely annotated: This is a sweet example of how you can get different structures developing in different orientations relative to the principal stress directions. In … Read more
Okay; we are nearing the end of our Transect saga. During the late Paleozoic, mountain building began anew, and deformed all the rocks we’ve mentioned so far. This final phase of Appalachian mountain-building is the Alleghanian Orogeny. It was caused by the collision of ancestral North America with the leading edge of Gondwana. At the … Read more
One of my students brought this sample in the other day: She said her father collected it in South Africa. It was labeled “suevite.” I learned the term suevite about a year ago, while touring the USGS Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater coring project samples at the USGS Headquarters in Reston, Virginia. Wright Horton taught me … Read more