Helmut Doelling with Yurgovuchia doellingi

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I'm glad to report that I have converted dinosaurpalaeo reader and AMNH fossil explainer Steve Cohen to the use of hugin. Here's the famous jumping Deinonychus mount in a panorama created by Steve. He's gotten really good at handling the program

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Many of you know that I love blogging because it takes me so many places, and I love talking about them. One thing I have tried to do is to get away from the best-known parks, or get to the lesser-known parts of the famous parks. I am on the final stages of a reconnaissance trip checking out the route of a proposed July 21-27 trip with the AAPG (although anyone is invited to join us). I came across some nice new localities, and I thought I would challenge some of my geography-expert readers to a bit of test. Name these parks and monuments! Some parks may be represented more than once. The parks are located on the Colorado Plateau. No prizes if you get them all, other than the realization that you must have an encyclopedia for a mind. A few clues are offered here and there....

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Thought I would give a few impressions of Moscow before it all fades from memory. My first trip, after all.

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We learned today that the Arizona Geological Survey has been selected to receive a Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) award at the 2012 Esri International User Conference in July in San Diego.  "This award is given to user sites around the world to ...

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How to enjoy a solar eclipse with your kids, making shadow magic with a pinhole viewer....

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Matt Hall and Evan Bianco of Agile Geoscience have put together this great new book. Pre-order it now on Amazon.

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Fiddler crab, Montaña de Oro State Park on California's Central Coast.  Photo by Ronn Koeppel.In planning this trip, I thought I would have all kinds of time to put together creative entertaining posts. Not the case ... too many fun things to do so I've been goofing off. Here are some photos for now; maybe I will get a real a post together tomorrow ... maybe.

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The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) has just posted better footage of Deepstaria, The scyphomedusa Deepstaria is certainly odd, with its bag-like appearance, and bell that can open more than a meter wide. Speculation on the identity ...

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Pretty poikiloblastic eyes.Patrick Donohue sent through the above picture a few months ago, and I'm finally posting it now. In the above picture, Patrick's parents' cat Annie has poikiloblastic eyes. Also hungry eyes. Kittehs are always hungry. ...

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It's been about a year since my post about the death of my dad's best friend, GF. I adored GF ever since I was a toddler, and I was a wreck after his loss. But I was hardly the only person in GF's life.

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SpaceX and NASA have completed a successful flight readiness review (FRR) for the Dragon's upcoming visit to the International Space Station....

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In areas of active mountain-building the middle crust can get hot and weak, like a soft jam/jelly filling in a sandwich.  These squishy rocks are hidden from us by the cold rigid upper crust, so we wouldn't expect to see them reach the surface, would we? Well, what happens if you overfill a sandwich and there's a break in the upper layer? Nanga Parbat in the Karakoram Himalaya tells us what.

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The next map I've put up shows the geologic features and activities that plate tectonics explains: volcanoes, earthquakes and faults, mainly. These things line up in very specific ways around the world, and those lines are what led scientists to come...

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I have been listening to an absolutely riveting series of talks hosted at Generation Anthropocene. This is a project dreamed up by young Stanford University researchers and it involves interviewing scientists working on the broad theme of human impa...

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Sea turtle bones are relatively common discoveries at Carmel Church. More specifically, we commonly find fragments of the the carapace (upper shell), almost all of which belong to a small, extinct turtle called Syllomus. While we've probably found over 100 carapace fragments, we don't commonly find any other parts of the skeleton. For many years, we had three or four vertebrae, and that was it. But in 2002 Bryce Harrison found our first fragmentary turtle humerus, shown above.

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Chauvet Cave is located in the Vallon Pont d'Arc commune of the Ardèche department of France. It is the site of some of the most spectacular and elaborate cave art in Europe, and possibly also some of the oldest. Estimates of the age of these cave paintings, based upon their style of art and level of sophistication have suggested they were made between 10 000 and 22 000 years ago, but radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dating has suggested the site may be as old as 30 000 to 32 000. This implies that early Europeans had reached a high level of artistic sophistication 10 000 years older than archaeologists had previously thought, something that has (unsurprisingly) been widely challenged.

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The other day a good friend gave me $50 trillion. It was a single note, the second highest ever printed. Of course, I was excited, although the money was from Zimbabwe and worth basically nothing, except what I could sell it for on eBay. The biggest thrill, beyond seeing so my zeros, was the picture on the front of the bill. It was clearly a cairn, three rocks stacked a top each other.

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A 500-foot rock face came crashing down from the Palisades cliffs along the Hudson River in Alpine, N.J. on Saturday night, shaking the ground for more than half a minute and dumping a fresh layer of boulders over a 100-yard strip of parkland below S...

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Over thirty years ago, James Hansen was lead author of a scientific paper titled Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. They estimated that doubling the amount of CO2 in the air would raise global temperature about 2.8 degrees (C, �...

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A Tyrannosaurus stands over the remains of an abandoned mini-golf course. Photo courtesy Joe Peterson. Dinosaurs and mini-golf: The two complement each other. Granted, dinosaurs probably wouldn't have been very good at the pastime--imagine how ha...

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The 'man-made hazard' of war is universal in many developing countries, but it is one of many social and physical hazards they experience firsthand.  This article from IHRR's archives looks specifically at research on resilience in young peopl...

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One of the ~350 or so blogs I subscribe to is Arctic Sea Ice by Neven. Today, he put up a post highlighting new daily data from IARC-JAXA, a collaboration between the International Arctic Research Center (IARC) at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).  Check it out. Here's a couple of things I was struck by:

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Sedimentary geologists, with our uniformitarian approach to the world, often look for modern environmental analogues that might help us to better understand the ancient deposits we study. Where they occur in close physical conjunction, the modern can inspire scientists analyzing the ancient. Although these sorts of things may well occur often, I can't seem to find an existing term that describes this phenomenon. I propose that we call them adjacent analogues.

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