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ESCONI Events for November 2026
Read more: ESCONI Events for November 2026Field trips require membership, but visitors are welcome at all meetings! Friday, November 13th General Meeting – 8:00 PM via Zoom. ESCONI member, Roy Plotnick, will be presenting “Lyell in Chicago: A Historic Collection Illustrates a Missing chapter in 19th Century Geology.” Saturday, November 14th Junior Study Group Meeting – 2:00 PM at College of DuPage, TEC, Room 1038A (Meett at 1:45 PM) Scott will guide the Juniors and their families on a tour of the Lizzadro Museum during this free day! You must RSVP for the 2:00 time slot to reserve your free museum tickets. Saturday, November 21th Paleontology…
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Mazon Creek 347: Mazon Creek in the Science Hub at the Field Museum
Read more: Mazon Creek 347: Mazon Creek in the Science Hub at the Field MuseumThis is Mazon Monday post #347. What’s your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at esconi.info@gmail.com. For the last few months and continuing for a while longer, Mazon Creek is center stage in the Field Museum’s Grainger Science Hub. The Science Hub is a great place to learn about the museum’s ongoing research and collections. It’s open daily from 10am to 3pm. Here is the exhibit’s description from the Field Museum’s website. Mazon Creek: Illinois’s Fossil Hotspot Imagine the Earth 300 million years ago. The planet was a vastly different place with both familiar and unfamiliar life. Tropical wetland forests…
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STEAM Fest 2026 – November 7th, 2026 – Julian Middle School, Oak Park
Read more: STEAM Fest 2026 – November 7th, 2026 – Julian Middle School, Oak ParkThe Oak Park Education Network is holding a STEAM Fest 2026 event at Julian Middle School in Oak Park, IL on Saturday, November 7th, 2026 from 10 AM to 2 PM. ESCONI will be there with a few tables. More details can be found here, here, and here.
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PBS Eons: Pumpkins Shouldn’t Exist… Happy Halloween!
Read more: PBS Eons: Pumpkins Shouldn’t Exist… Happy Halloween!PBS Eons has a new post and this one is sort of about Halloween. Pumpkins only survived thanks to an unlikely partnership they forged with another type of mammal. One that still found them to be toxic and disgusting at first, but could see the potential in the relationship. Us.
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Fossil Friday #341: Mazon Creek Coprolite
Read more: Fossil Friday #341: Mazon Creek CoproliteKane McLuckie and his father, Robert, brought one of Kane’s recent fossil finds to our Mazon Creek Fossil Day event. It’s a large Mazon Creek coprolite found near their house. Coprolites are fairly common. If you find one, get out a magnifying glass and have a closer look. You can all kinds of things in coprolites… scales, plant parts, seeds, calcareous worms, and even bones!
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Throwback Thursday #341: Rockford Brick and Tile Company
Read more: Throwback Thursday #341: Rockford Brick and Tile CompanyI was looking through some old newsletters looking for interesting bits of ESCONI history and ran across the announcement for the opening of the Fossil & Prairie Park Preserve in Rockford, IA. It opened officially 36 years ago in October 1990.
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‘Jodi,’ a Nanotyrannus Skeleton, Gets $47.3 Million at Auction
Read more: ‘Jodi,’ a Nanotyrannus Skeleton, Gets $47.3 Million at AuctionThe New York Times is reporting that “Jodi” the Nanotyrannus lancensis sold for 47.3 million at Sotheby’s on October 27th, 2026. Both the buyer and seller are unknown at this time… Ok, who bought and when are you inviting us over to see it?!? A skeleton belonging to a smaller relative of Tyrannosaurus rex was sold at auction on Tuesday for nearly $47.3 million, far beyond projections. It was the latest lucrative sale of a fossil coming out of the field of commercial paleontology. The final price, $47,255,000, was higher than other recent auctions of larger dinosaur fossils, though below…
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What Happened to the Neanderthals?
Read more: What Happened to the Neanderthals?The New York Times has an interesting article about the Neanderthals. Are they us? Amid the daunting saga that is human evolution, the Neanderthals, so recent and closely studied, are in many ways the accessible celebrities of the story. Their fate seems to offer a toehold on the big questions about how we came to be the last species standing. What happened to the Neanderthals, then? One glib answer is that they are still here, lurking in the DNA of present-day people in tiny amounts. Ancient DNA studies revealed that Neanderthals and Denisovans, and possibly others, didn’t so much as…
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Mazon Creek 346: SciShow “The Bizarre Case of the Tully Monster”
Read more: Mazon Creek 346: SciShow “The Bizarre Case of the Tully Monster”The SciShow is a Youtube channel with interesting videos. Just a few days ago, they posted an episode about our friend the “Tully Monster.” With the exception of their pronunciation of Mazon Creek (see Mazon Monday #147), they did a very good job telling the long and ongoing story of the Tully Monster…
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Fright at the Field – October 26th to November 1st, 2026… They are open late!
Read more: Fright at the Field – October 26th to November 1st, 2026… They are open late!Checkout “Fright at the Field“, open at the Field Museum from October 28th to 30th, 2026. Spooky season has arrived at the Field Museum! Join us for Fright at the Field, a Halloween experience featuring the return of Underground MISadventure, and Halloween Harvest Maze, a new spooky takeover of Plants of the World. Plus, explore the Museum to find seven creepy-cool specimens, like Witch’s Hat Fungus and the Vampire Bat, to complete Chompy’s Secret Lair challenge to win a special prize! Underground MISadventure: Zombie Fungus This year, Underground Adventure will transform into Underground MISadventure: Zombie Fungus. Step into an immersive…
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Creatures of the Night at Garfield Park Conservatory on Wednesday, October 28th, 2026 from 4 – 7 PM
Read more: Creatures of the Night at Garfield Park Conservatory on Wednesday, October 28th, 2026 from 4 – 7 PMCreatures of the Night at Garfield Park Conservatory When: Wednesday, October 28, 4 to 7:30 p.m. Where: Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago, Illinois Details can be found here: http://garfieldconservatory.org/event/creatures-of-the-night/ Look for ESCONI’s Community Outreach volunteers at the booth labeled Fossils and Crystal search station on the attached map graphic. You can collect fossil shark and ray teeth and tiny crystals (some fluorescent!), and then decorate a box to hold your collection. You can also touch examples of Coal Age fossils that inspired the Conservatory’s Fern Room and take home a lump of coal.
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Fossil Friday #340: Hexaphyllostrobus negauneeana from Pit 3
Read more: Fossil Friday #340: Hexaphyllostrobus negauneeana from Pit 3Marty Houdek brought some very nice fossils for his display at the Mazon Creek Fossil Day event. One of his best was a very rare Hexaphyllostrobus negauneeana from the area of Pit 3 in Braidwood. H. negauneeana was described in July of 2025 by some of our friends at the Field Museum (see Mazon Monday #277).
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Throwback Thursday #340: Happy 152nd Birthday, Charles Knight!
Read more: Throwback Thursday #340: Happy 152nd Birthday, Charles Knight!Charles Knight was born on October 21st, 1874. That would make him 152 today. Unfortunately, he passed away on April 15th, 1953 at the age of 78. Knight was an American wildlife and paleoartist during the early 1900s. He is probably best known for his many detailed paintings of dinosaurs and prehistoric life created for multiple major museums in the United States. The Field Museum has an interesting Photo Archive page about Charles Knight.
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What Can Four-Winged Dinosaurs Teach Us About Birds?
Read more: What Can Four-Winged Dinosaurs Teach Us About Birds?The New York Times’ Trilobites column has an interesting story about four-winged birds. A new paper in the journal Nature Communications describes a new Microraptorinae, Norellraptor barsboldi, named for the late paleontologist Mark Norell. This new animal lived about 121 million years ago in what is now northeastern China. More than 120 million years ago, a small creature soared across the Cretaceous skies above China. Was it a bird or a pterosaur or … a four-winged raptor? Researchers recently examined a remarkably well-preserved skeleton of such a dinosaur — it sported sharp claws, a mouthful of teeth and twice the…
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Video for ESCONI October 2026 Paleontology Study Group Meeting – “Depositional and Lithostratigraphic Characterization of the Lower Maysvillian Calloway Creek Formation”
Read more: Video for ESCONI October 2026 Paleontology Study Group Meeting – “Depositional and Lithostratigraphic Characterization of the Lower Maysvillian Calloway Creek Formation”The ESCONI October 2026 Paleontology Study Group Meeting was held on Saturday October 17th, 2026 at 7:30 PM via Zoom. Enrique Clark presented on “Depositional and Lithostratigraphic Characterization of the Lower Maysvillian Calloway Creek Formation.” The upper Ordovician (lower Maysvillian) Calloway Creek formation of central Kentucky consists majorly of fossiliferous limestones with interbedded minor shales. This project aims to characterize distinct facies of the Calloway Creek and determine their depositional implications alongside their correlative relationships to equivalent horizons. Furthermore, an overview of the fossil fauna will be conducted to further explain the paleoecological characteristics and their relationships to accompanying facies.…
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Mazon Monday #345: Danville Field Trip Report
Read more: Mazon Monday #345: Danville Field Trip ReportESCONI held a field trip to a Danville area spoil pile on October 17th, 2026. Although the day started sunny but crisp with temperatures in the 30’s (!), it was a very clear day with plenty of sun and temperatures in the 50’s. Collecting on the old spoil pile was very productive. Plant fossils were found in great abundance and Ben Riegler found a very nice insect wing!
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Incredibly Rare “Jodi” The Nanotyrannus At The Center Of Heated T. Rex Debate Goes Up For Auction At Sotheby’s
Read more: Incredibly Rare “Jodi” The Nanotyrannus At The Center Of Heated T. Rex Debate Goes Up For Auction At Sotheby’sIFLScience has a story about another dinosaur up for sale at Sotheby’s. This one is named “Jodi” and is a Nanotyrannus. It was discovered by rancher Jodi Pierson in 2019. It was found just a few miles from the famous “Dueling Dinosaurs.” With 191 bone elements, including an almost complete skull with 35 teeth, Jodi is in remarkable shape considering her age. The larger number of teeth in Nanotyrannus fossils is one of the key pieces of evidence for it belonging to a different species, along with the smaller number of tail bones. At 2 meters (6.5 feet) tall and…
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PBS Eons: The Biggest Extinction You’ve Never Heard Of
Read more: PBS Eons: The Biggest Extinction You’ve Never Heard OfPBS Eons has a new video. This one is about the mass extinction caused by the migration of India during the Paleogene. In the early 20th century, it was discovered there was a point in the fossil record where most European mammals just…vanished, only to be replaced with others native to Asia. While you’ve probably never heard of this extinction, it was the biggest one since the end of the dinosaurs, nearly taking out our primate ancestors, and by extension, us.
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Fossil Friday #339: A Breathtaking Lycopod Cone
Read more: Fossil Friday #339: A Breathtaking Lycopod ConeWe saw quite a few very nice Mazon Creek fossils last week at the 2026 Mazon Creek Fossil Day. One of the most notable was the lycopod cone brought in by Merry Jo Montgomery. The fossil was found earlier this summer by her daughter, Laura Adamczyk.
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Throwback Thursday #339: The Rocks We Live On
Read more: Throwback Thursday #339: The Rocks We Live OnFor today, we have an article written by Billy Kelly for the October 1955 edition of the ESCONI. Bill wrote many articles for the newsletter over the years. He and his wife Wylma were very generous with their time. They went on many field trips, including this one to Silvania, OH in 1959 (see Throwback Thursday #33).
Mazon Creek Fossil Day – October 10th, 2026!
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- ESCONI Events for November 2026
Field trips require membership, but visitors are welcome at all meetings! Friday, November 13th General Meeting – 8:00 PM via… Read more: ESCONI Events for November 2026
- About ESCONI
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- ESCONI Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Show
- ESCONI in the News
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- Flashback Friday
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- Mazon Creek
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- Member Spotlight
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- Throwback Thursday
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Field trips require membership, but visitors are welcome at all meetings!
| Friday, November 13th | General Meeting – 8:00 PM via Zoom. ESCONI member, Roy Plotnick, will be presenting “Lyell in Chicago: A Historic Collection Illustrates a Missing chapter in 19th Century Geology.” |
| Saturday, November 14th | Junior Study Group Meeting – 2:00 PM at College of DuPage, TEC, Room 1038A (Meett at 1:45 PM) Scott will guide the Juniors and their families on a tour of the Lizzadro Museum during this free day! You must RSVP for the 2:00 time slot to reserve your free museum tickets. |
| Saturday, November 21th | Paleontology Study Group – 7:30 PM via Zoom Owen Goodchild, PhD candidate, Richard Gilder Graduate School and American Museum of Natural History will present “American Elephants: Untangling the evolution and biogeography of N. American Proboscideans.” |
| No meeting this month | Mineralogy Study Group |