Estemmenosuchus
Slightly annotated photo of a Permian therapsid skull on display in the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. Another photo of this same skull is here. This reptile needs an orthodontist.
fossils
Good lighting on invertebrate fossils
Good lighting on these fossils at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, eh? You’ve got a batch of brachiopods mixed with crinoid columnals and little cornucopia-shaped rugose corals. Maybe some sponge spicules in there, too… This is a great rock because (a) it’s full of well-preserved fossils in a fine-grained matrix, and (b) it’s … Read more
Dinosaur eggs from Devil’s Coulee, on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, Drumheller
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.
Pachycephalosaurs were boneheads
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!
Morning with the local expert
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.
Guest post: Turtle Mountain and the infamous Frank Slide
A guest post by Nicholas Rossi, a student in Callan’s Canadian Rockies field course. Turtle Mountain is located in the Blairmore Range in Alberta Canada about 160km south of Calgary. It is the site of the Frank Slide, a landslide of over 90 million tons of rock that gave way on Turtle Mountain’s East side … Read more
Bearpaw bivalves
Cretaceous clams from the final big transgression of the Western Interior Seaway, the “Bearpaw Sea”: We saw these last month at Devil’s Coulee in southern Alberta. They’re big!
Class portrait at the Walcott Quarry
Here’s my crew from July’s Regional Field Geology of the Canadian Rockies course, checking out the Burgess Shale at the Walcott Quarry in Yoho National Park. A couple of the locals joined us for this portrait. Original photo courtesy of Stephen Smith, modified by CB
Permian fusulinids from west Texas
Today, I’m going to show you some monster-sized single-celled organisms: giant fusulinid forams from the western flank of the Franklin Mountains in west Texas, beyond El Paso. I saw these critters in February when I went on a field trip there led by Josh Villalobos of El Paso Community College. Here’s the scene where we … Read more
Snowball students visit the University of Maryland
The final meeting of my spring semester Snowball Earth class was a field trip to the University of Maryland, hosted by Snowball guru Jay Kaufman, a specialist in chemostratigraphy using stable isotopes. Here, Jay welcomes the class to his wet lab: Doing chemostratigraphy takes lots of samples. Here’s a drawer full of samples from one … Read more