ScotBlogs

MITZPE RAMON, ISRAEL–It was a little warmer today in Makhtesh Gadol, but the sun was still obscured by the dust blown across the southern Mediterranean from the Sahara Desert. I may have an innate tolerance for dust from my childhood … Continue reading →

MITZPE RAMON, ISRAEL–Melissa Torma, our friend Yoav Avni (Geological Survey of Israel), and I just ended a productive first day in the field. The two of them are shown above in classic paleontological poses. They are collecting fossils from Subunit … Continue reading →

I thought Rick Santorum was going to be the anti-environmental presidential candidate, with his talk about global warming as a hoax perpetrated by left-wing scientists. But now I think Mitt Romney has an oar in this pool as well.  Apparently … Continue reading →

It’s a low-light, iPad photo, but at least it shows Wooster geology junior Melissa Torma enjoying a fine meal in the Hotel Ramon of Mitzpe Ramon, deep in the Negev of Israel. We arrived here this afternoon after a 22-hour … Continue reading →

It’s only half a bone, but the above is one of my favorite fossils. This is a vertebra of an ichthyosaur, identifiable by its figure-8 cross-section. It is from the Sundance Formation (Middle-Late Jurassic) of Natrona County, Wyoming … and … Continue reading →

Happy International Women’s Day! I’ve been reflecting on what it means to be a female geology professor ever since the Wooster Alumni Magazine featured an article on Annie Irish, the first woman on Wooster’s faculty. Her portrait graces the foyer of … Continue reading →

Join the Office of Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs and C3: Cross-Cultural Connections for our International Women’s Day Celebration, beginning tomorrow night, Wednesday, at 630pm, in the Babcock Formal Lounge.  We will have a few speakers, consisting of students, faculty and community … Continue reading →

Two fossils this week in our series. The large segmented cone is a bisected nautiloid cephalopod from the Upper Ordovician of northern Kentucky. The original shell (made of the mineral aragonite) has been dissolved away, leaving the sediment that filled … Continue reading →

Last month I was fortunate to visit the  French Museum of Natural History in Paris (the Musee Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle, MNHN), where there is a great deal of  interesting work going on. At the lab I visited, a number of … Continue reading →

The irony of me appearing for brief moments as a commentator on last night’s episode of Ancient Aliens (“Aliens and Mega-Disasters“) is that I teach a course at Wooster entitled “Nonsense! And Why It’s So Popular“. One of our favorite … Continue reading →