Two new GIGAmacro images of fossil scallops from Virginia’s Coastal Plain – Chesapecten nefrens: [gigapan id=”170847″] link Chesapecten jeffersonius: [gigapan id=”171285″] 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 … 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