Two new GIGAmacro images of fossil scallops from Virginia’s Coastal Plain – Chesapecten nefrens: link Chesapecten jeffersonius: link My vision is to get the opposite side of each of these samples as well as a half-dozen other species in this genus, perhaps even multiple individual specimens of each species, to allow students to do a … Read more
A report from the field: new outcrops of Ordovician-aged turbidites featuring geopetal indicators, fossil content, and a structural overprint imparted during Pangaea’s assembly.
My family and I went to the Strasburg Museum in Strasburg, Virginia, last fall, because (1) we’ve lived out here for two and a half years now without stopping in, and we felt “overdue” for checking it out, and (2) a big train is prominently featured out front, and my son is really keen on … Read more
I love moraines, rocky beaches, gravel bars – they are like a giant smorgasbord of delicious goodies. Here, for instance, are some close-ups of a trilobite-bearing boulder on the south lateral moraine of the Athasbasca Glacier, Jasper National Park, Alberta. And what are these things? Any ideas?
Long week, no blog. But, hey – it’s Saturday, and I have a couple of hours of breathing room – so here are some stylolites in a crinoidal grainstrone in the New Creek member of the Helderberg Formation, exposed on Corridor H in West Virginia. Stylolites are pressure solution features, which overall form perpendicular to … 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
Archaeotherium skull, on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta: I love these beasts since I first encountered mention of them at Badlands National Park, and reading them dubbed “grizzly pigs” in the excellent book Cruising the Fossil Freeway really stuck with me – these were pigs filling a predatory ecological niche we … Read more
Here are some rugose coral fossils (along with some cross-sectioned articulate brachiopod shells) to be seen in the Clearville member (~80 feet thick) of the Mahantango Formation, exposed on the north side of route 55, just west of the West Virginia / Virginia border. These fossils are cool in their own right (what fossils aren’t?) … Read more
While in West Texas over spring break, the “Border to Beltway” students took a hike up McKittrick Canyon, in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. This is part of the famed Permian reef complex, the deep reservoir of Texas’s rich endowment of oil. Here, the reef comes to the surface. In fact, it pokes up a good … Read more
Have a gander at this: Given that this is a Friday on Mountain Beltway, you might expect to see a fold here, and indeed, there’s something wavy and high-contrast running through the center of this sample. But that’s no fold. It’s a fossil plant! A “reed” of some kind, I guess. You can also see … Read more
Back to Texas, today. Here’s a cross-sectioned Turitella snail from the Buda Formation limestone: It’s exposed in a block of rock on the north side of Mt. Cristo Rey. You can explore these GigaPanned blocks of the Buda in search of your own Turitella… How many can you find? link link link
My colleague Joshua Villalobos shared this image with me the other day – it’s a thin section of fusulinid-bearing limestone of the (Permian aged) Hueco Formation, from the Tom Mays Unit of Franklin Mountains State Park, Texas. Click to enlarge Note the scale bar at lower left. The big fusulinid in the middle is 3mm … Read more
These four slabs, collected at “Fossil Hill,” north of the Cristo Rey laccolith at the Chihuahua (Mexico) / Texas / New Mexico triple point, bear positively-weathering fossils of the benthic foraminiferid called Cribratina, an index fossil for the Albian age / stage: My field notebook serves as an imperfect sense of scale. Here’s the Albian … Read more
Today, I initiate a series of posts based on some of the geology I saw over spring break, in west Texas and southern New Mexico, on the field exchange between Northern Virginia Community College and El Paso Community College that I helped facilitate. We spent our first morning in the field in the Franklin Mountains, … Read more
A young-Earth creationist reinterprets one of Callan’s blog posts in light of a Biblical flood. Callan responds with a demonstration of how new information can change a true scientist’s mind, but no amount of data can convince someone whose conclusions are based on faith rather than empirical data.
Today, a few more photos from the field trip last month to Corridor H, the fine new superhighway with so little traffic out in eastern West Virginia. Our antepenultimate stop of the day was at an outcrop we inferred should hold the Oriskany Sandstone, a Devonian quartz arenite that lies stratigraphically above the Helderberg Group … Read more
More images for you today from my field trip a few weeks ago to West Virginia’s bizarro highway Corridor H, a quiet place built for roaring traffic. Its multistory roadcuts are fresh and profound; they offer the most incredible views into the mid-to-late-Paleozoic surface of Earth… and the creatures that lived there. In the Devonian … Read more
I went out last Tuesday to Corridor H, the exemplary new highway cutting through the Valley and Ridge province of eastern West Virginia. Joining me was former student Alan Pitts, a devotee of Corridor H from way back in the early days when we just called it “New Route 55.” The boondoggle highway is now … Read more
At the eroded gully known as Devil’s Coulee in Alberta, you can find armored mudballs, dinosaur fossils (including eggshell), and even marine clams at higher levels in the sequence. Check out these lovely beasts: They lived and died on the western shore of the Western Interior Seaway during the Cretaceous period of geologic time. My … Read more
On a cold winter’s day, Callan harks back to a summer’s afternoon fossilizing in the Rocky Mountains. A few choice images of Mississippian-aged marine invertebrates are shared.