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The fascinating, awe inspiring, beer drinking world influenced by the earth's oldest science. This blog is about all things geology. Landmarks, minerals, sedimentary deposition, pretty pictures, and humor all fall into this category.
If you ever have questions dealing with your labs or you homeworks, ask. I will be able to find you the answer if I don't know it off the top of my head.
Also, send me links and I will give you credit.
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Five year old girl digs up 160 million year old fossil.
She was armed with a spade better suited to building sandcastles than archaeological digs.
But that was all five-year-old Emily Baldry needed to unearth a rare fossil thought to be more than 160million years old. Emily pulled the 9st specimen out of the ground at Cotswold Water Park in Gloucestershire with the help of her father Jon, 40.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2036505/Emily-Baldry-5-digs-rare-160m-year-old-fossil-Cotswold-Water-Park.html#ixzz1Y4T2WaHM -
Hallucigenia, (meaning strage and dream-like) was a small worm-ish creature that scurried about the ocean floor on longe stilt-like legs. Our little friend here has suffered much confusion in the paleontological community, it was first depicted upside-down, because it was thought that what are now seen as defensive spikes were it’s legs. It is unknown which end is the front, there are dark stains at bothe ends of fossils, either of which may be a head. Maybe we have a CatDog on our hands. Recent specimens of Hallucigenia were found to have small claws on the tentacles, which are what brought about the change of which end was up. It is unknown what it’s spines were made of, but they haven’t preserved well, so it is likely they were soft, and serverd little defensive purposes. Perhaps they were like the spines of the sea urchin… That’s enough speculation from me, though. It was likely a decomposer of the sea floor, like the friendly little slimebag, the hagfish, and fed on decaying animal corpses. It has been found in Burgess Shale and Cambrian Maotianshan.
(Source: lifethroughgeologictime)
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Pterygotus, I’m really happy for you, and I’mma let you finish, but Arthropleura was the largest land invertibrate of all time. Arthropleura had a flat, segmented body with bumpy ornamentation. It was an upper Carboniferous relative of centipedes and millipedes, but was not one of the two itself. It’s size may be attributed to two environmental conditions, a lack of terrestrial predators, and the immense concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere (which is why we can’t have giant bugs anymore, so those of you fearing the giant ant takeover, don’t worry, it can’t happen.) It is mostly known from fossil segments, but rare complete specimes have been found, and so have it’s long, sinuous trackways. It had many segmented legs (the legs had many segments,) which sets it apart from centipedes and millipedes. It has been found in OH, PA, IL, KA, NM, Canada, and Europe.
(Source: lifethroughgeologictime)
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n305_w1150 by BioDivLibrary on Flickr.
Various fossil fish and shark teeth
A pictorial atlas of fossil remains
London :H.G. Bohn,1850.
biodiversitylibrary.org/item/97662
