ScotBlogs

Yesterday astronaut Scott Kelly returned from nearly a year in free fall aboard the International Space Station to join his identical twin brother Mark back on Earth. Due to their different spacetime paths, Scott aged about 25 µs less than his … Continue reading →

This shell looks like a cinnamon roll. It is another product of the 1996 Wooster-Keck expedition to Cyprus with Steve Dornbos (’97) and me. Like the rest of the Cypriot specimens on this blog, it is from the Nicosia Formation … Continue reading →

Cyprus again for this week’s fossil. This is a nearly complete shell of the predatory snail Conus pelagicus Brocchi 1814 found at the Epsilos exposure of the Nicosia Formation (Pliocene) on the Mesaoria Plain of central Cyprus by Steve Dornbos … Continue reading →

One of the first things I did as a grad student in 1982 was tour the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) prototype on the Caltech campus about a block from my dorm. It was housed in an industrial-looking L-shaped … Continue reading →

We return to Cyprus for this week’s fossil. This is a broken shell of the predatory muricid Bolinus brandaris (Linnaeus, 1758) found at the Coral Reef exposure of the Nicosia Formation (Pliocene) on the Mesaoria Plain of central Cyprus by … Continue reading →

This brachiopod, identified as Glyptorthis insculpta (Hall, 1847), was shared with me by its collector, Diane from New York State. She found it in a muddy horizon of the Bull Fork Formation (Upper Ordovician) in southeastern Indiana. She immediately noted … Continue reading →

You’re probably familiar with the iconic photograph of Edmund Hillary standing atop Earth’s highest mountain wearing an oxygen mask in air so thin the sky is almost black as space — but actually, Hillary’s companion Tenzing Norgay didn’t know how … Continue reading →

Yes, the above image doesn’t look much like a brachiopod, but just wait. We see a trepostome bryozoan with extended knobs and a few borings. Flip it over, though … … and we see that the bryozoan almost entirely covers … Continue reading →

This week’s brief entry (it is short because we’re in the first few days of a new semester at Wooster) is related to last week’s post. Above are two gastropod opercula from the Nicosia Formation (Pliocene) of Cyprus. They were … Continue reading →

We saw this broken gastropod from the Pliocene of Cyprus in this blog post about two and a half years ago. I recently rediscovered it while sorting specimens and decided to show this intriguing perspective through the broken part of … Continue reading →