I spent last Thursday on a long field trip in the Valley and Ridge province of northernwestern Virginia. Leading the trip was Dan Doctor of the USGS-Reston. Accompanying Dan was a UVA environmental science student named Nathan. And the NOVA crew rounded it out: professor Ken Rasmussen from the Annandale campus, associate professor Victor Zabielski … Read more
Spent the day in the field yesterday with Liz Johnson of James Madison University and her fun group of students in a “Geology of Skyline Drive” summer course. More on the geology later… For now, I just wanted to toss a group of photos of poison ivy up here. Look at this beautiful plant! Look, … Read more
In honor of Mother’s Day, I offer up an unusual bouquet of flowers… These are not really flowers, of course, but an odd form of lichen that I found in the Crazy Mountains of Montana last summer, growing on a spruce tree. Freaky little things, eh? All shots are with the macro function on: the … Read more
Over Snowmageddon, I read Connie Barlow’s book The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms. [Google Books; Amazon] Barlow isn’t a scientist, but she’s got a scientist in her pocket: Paul Martin of the University of Arizona. In 1982, Martin and Dan Janzen of the University of Pennsylvania published a paper … Read more