A terrifically told update on dinosaur paleoecology and evolution by an enthusiastic practitioner of the Mesozoic arts. Brusatte paints himself as coming of age in the time of Jurassic Park, an obsessed ‘fanboy’ of dinosaurs and celebrity paleontologists, who then matures and innovates through an impressive series of field experiences and methodological devices to become … Read more
A book review of Paige Williams’ “The Dinosaur Artist,” a tale of international trade in dinosaur skeletons.
Because of my commute, I consume multiple books at the same time. I listen to one in the car, and I read another (or more than one other) at home, on traditional paper. This past week, I read Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton and listened to David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens. I chose the Dickens … Read more
Walter Alvarez has a new book out, and its publication reminded me that though I read and appreciated The Mountains of St. Francis, I had never read his most famous work — the account of how he and his father and a team of other researchers zeroed in on an extraterrestrial impact explanation for the … Read more
Good morning. Here are two images from last March’s “Border to Beltway” field trip to West Texas, on the north flanks of the Cristo Rey laccolith. Specifically, these are Cretaceous strata of the Anapra Sandstone, looking at the bedding plane of the rocks. Cutting across bedding are a series of fractures (joints) that have been … Read more
In July, I found a dinosaur bone in Dinosaur Provincial Park! It was lying in a wash coming off a small mesa, and sure enough, when the students and I walked up the little draw, we came to in situ bones poking out of the cliff above. After showing it to the students, I put … Read more
Everything’s bigger in Texas, even the footprints…
Each one is the size (and shape) of a nice sourdough boule – Because they were in a glass case, I couldn’t get a good sense of scale in the same focal plane.
That’s my posse of field course students (plus co-instructor Pete Berquist, fifth from the left) at Drumheller, Alberta, in July.
This is a display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta: It shows the domed skull of a pachycephalosaur: And it shows a virtual cross-section through that skull, revealing the size of the brain it protects: Weird animal. Great museum display: it says it all!
Royal Tyrrell Museum geologist Dave Eberth donates time and expertise to help Callan’s students understand the Cretaceous-aged Horseshoe Canyon Formation in central Alberta.
Ever seen an armored mud ball? In this post, Callan encounters a small herd of these geological oddities in a coulee in southern Alberta.
Just because I felt like making something silly…
All this talk about footprints and tail traces, and I haven’t even shown you any “for sure” dinosaur fossils. Well, let’s remedy that today. We return now to the scene: exposures of the Jurassic Morrison Formation, on the east side of the Bighorn Basin, just north of Shell, Wyoming. I was wandering around, finding things … Read more
Okay, so I was out photographing ripples and admiring lichens, and then I saw this: That’s a rippled slab of sandstone, but with a linear groove that obliquely cross-cuts the ripple marks. Smaller, parallel grooves lie within the main groove. Here’s another look at that same one, spun around and zoomed-in: It looks as if … Read more
At the Sheridan College natural history museum, this past summer.
Our field class visited the Museum of the Rockies yesterday. Here’s the full team!
Visiting Butch Dooley and crew on a dinosaur dig in the Jurassic Morrison Formation on Wednesday morning, I did a lot of wandering around the area, dubbed the Two Sisters site. I noticed something in the sandstone at the top of one hillock, and thought it looked like a sauropod footprint: (The depression is filled … Read more
The author describes a quick visit to the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville, Virginia, on his way back to DC from Thanksgiving travel. Highlights: a dinosaur, a giant stromatolite, encrusting crinoids (they do that?) and a giant ground sloth.