Virginia Museum of Natural History specimens in GIGAmacro view

One of the small sub-projects of my 2015-2017 Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professorship is to create some GIGAmacro images of cool fossil specimens from the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville. Curator of paleontology Alex Hastings was good enough to loan us a few specimens to image, and hopefully there will soon be more where they … Read more

Pillows in Icelandic basalts

Time is short these days, but I know you hanker for amazing geology. How about some pillow basalts from the Snæfellsnes* Peninsula, far western Iceland? Note the cm-demarcated pencil for scale. See if you can find it in the GigaPan version below: [gigapan id=”188175″] Link Handheld GigaPan by Callan Bentley, stitched with Microsoft ICE _________________________ … Read more

Viewing the Sea Point migmatite through the lens of GigaPan

It was five years ago when I first visited Sea Point, the outcrop on the coast of the Cape Peninsula where the Cape Granite (~540 Ma) intrudes the (meta-)sedimentary rocks of the Malmesbury Group. The outcrop is (a) beautiful and evocative, and (b) of historical importance, as Charles Darwin visited it while on the voyage … Read more

Oldest fossils in the UK: M.I.S.S. in Stoer Group, Scotland

This is the Split Rock at Clachtoll, on the shore of the North-West Highlands of Scotland. You’re looking out to sea, over the Minch. It’s the site that graces the cover of the excellent book A Geological Excursion Guide to the North-West Highlands of Scotland, by Kathryn Goodenough and Marten Krabbendam. “Clach toll” apparently means … Read more