ScotBlogs

Small comma-shaped trace fossils this week in a Cretaceous (Upper Campanian) oyster (Pycnodonte vesicularis) from the Aubeterre Formation of southwestern France. (Locality C/W-747, Plage des Nonnes, to be exact.) These are borings produced by barnacles, which are sedentary crustaceans more … Continue reading →

About a month ago, I wrote on this blog about an exceptionally dry late summer for Wooster.  It was dry enough to put much of northeast Ohio in a moderate drought.  But of course the moment I published that blog … Continue reading →

Newsweek published a scary-looking headline yesterday: “NASA DISCOVERS MANTLE PLUME ALMOST AS HOT AS YELLOWSTONE SUPERVOLCANO THAT’S MELTING ANTARCTICA FROM BELOW.” It’s a scary idea, right? That heat that drives Yellowstone’s steam vents, boiling hot springs, and explosive geysers is … Continue reading →

It’s hard to believe that we were at the 2017 GSA Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington just last week. Once again, the Wooster Geologists had a strong showing.  

While preparing for this summer’s expedition to the Middle Jurassic of southwestern Utah, I found this specimen in our collection from the 1990s. You may be able to just make out the wedge-shaped outline of a mytilid-like bivalve with several … Continue reading →

I’ve been fascinated by aperiodic tilings of the plane since Martin Gardner first wrote about them in Scientific American. In the 1960s, Robert Berger discovered a set of 20 426 prototiles or tile-types that can tile the plane but only with no … Continue reading →

Thanks to some beautiful fall weather, installation of glass in the two-story Knowlton Commons area of Williams Hall is just about complete.

Today’s post is in honor of Macy Conrad’s (Wooster ’18) poster at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, which was held earlier this week. It is also to recognize again the Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) genius of … Continue reading →

If all goes to plan, today I leave for the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America, held this year in Seattle, Washington. To mark the occasion, this week’s fossil is from a poster Macy Conrad (’18), Paul Taylor … Continue reading →

This year Caroline Buttler (Department of Natural Sciences, Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales) and I had a great project describing a cave-dwelling fauna in the Upper Ordovician of northern Kentucky. We hope that work will appear soon in the … Continue reading →