Month: February 2021
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March Mammal Madness 2021
The “Mammals Suck… Milk!” blog is running a March Madness type tournament with Mammal species. The tournament was created by Dr. David Schiffman a mammologist at Arizona State University. It is a simulated combat between the animals. Follow along and make a bracket. They will be posting update throughout the month of March. BUT WELCOME…
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PBS Eons: The Genes We Lost Along the Way
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about fossil genes. Our DNA holds thousands of dead genes and we’ve only just begun to unravel their stories. But one thing is already clear: we’re not just defined by the genes that we’ve gained over the course of our evolution, but also by the…
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Fossil Friday #45: Eutrephoceras
This is the “Fossil Friday” post #45. Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website. We will post any fossil pictures you send in to esconi.info@gmail.com. Please include a short description or story. Check the #FossilFriday Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world! We have another mollusk this week. This…
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ESCONI Events March 2021
Field trips require membership, but visitors are welcome at all meetings! Fri, Mar 12th ESCONI General Meeting 8:00 PM Zoom – Topic: “The Big Hill Lagerstätte; a small locality with large implications for early chelicerate evolution” by Dr. James Lamsdell of West Virginia University. Zoom link. Sat, Mar 13th ESCONI Junior Meeting 7:00 PM Zoom –…
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Throwback Thursday #47: The Rockhound’s Creed
This is Throwback Thursday #47. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks! Today, we have “The Rockhound’s Creed” a poem by Agate Pete, which appeared in the October 1957 edition…
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Report from ESCONI February 2021 Paleontology Meeting – “Ammonite Fields Forever”
If you missed the Paleontology Study Group meeting last Saturday (or even if you did attend), Rhonda Gates wrote an excellent report on their trip to the North Yorkshire beaches in England last February. The full pdf file can be downloaded here. Ammonite Fields Forever: From the Jurassic Coast to collecting on the beaches of…
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Burpee PaleoFest 2021 – March 5, 6, and 7
Head on over to the Burpee Museum’s website for information on PaleoFast 2021. Held on March 5th, 6th, and 7th, 2021, it’s going to be all virtual this year. Join the Fun Dino-lovers, rock collectors, and fossil diggers unite for an internationally attended festival. Our audience includes scientists and researchers, aspiring scientists, students, paleo-lovers, and even dino-loving…
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Mazon Monday #48: Kallidecthes richardsoni
This is Mazon Monday post #48. What’s your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:esconi.info@gmail.com. Kallidecthes richardsoni was described in 1969 by Frederick Schram. It was named for Eugene Richardson, who was then the Curator of Fossil Invertebrates at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, IL. It’s an extinct species of shrimp…
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Cretaceous Amber Fossil Sheds Light on Evolution of Bioluminescence in Beetles
Science Tech Daily has a story about bioluminescence in beetles. This study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, looked at an insect preserved in amber from Myanmar. Myanmar amber dates to Cretaceous Period about 99 million years ago, Bioluminescence has fascinated people since time immemorial. The majority of organisms…
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PBS Eons: The Return of Giant Skin-Shell Sea Turtles
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about one of the largest turtles that every lived… Archelon. The biggest turtle ever described wasn’t an ancestor of today’s leatherback turtles or any other living sea turtles. But it looks like there are some things about being a giant, skin-shelled sea turtle that just…
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Fossil Friday #44: Braceville Scallop
This is the “Fossil Friday” post #44. Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website. We will post any fossil pictures you send in to esconi.info@gmail.com. Please include a short description or story. Check the #FossilFriday Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world! Scallops. Who hasn’t enjoyed a nice tasty…
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Throwback Thursday #46: 25 and 50 Years Ago
This is Throwback Thursday #46. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks! 25 Years Ago – February 1996 50 Years Ago – February 1971
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Reminder: ESCONI February 2021 Paleontology Meeting – February 20th, 2021 at 7:30 PM via Zoom – “Ammonite Fields Forever”
Ammonite Fields Forever: from the Jurassic Coast to collecting on the beaches of North Yorkshire, England. On February 20th, four club members – Marie Angkuw, Rhonda Gates, Deborah Lovely, and Andrew Young – will host a slide presentation on their March 2020 fossil-collecting adventure to North Yorkshire, England. Based in the historic harbor town of…
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Phys.org: Enormous ancient fish fossil discovered in search of pterodactyl remains
Phys.org has a post about an absolutely enormous fish fossil. A paper published in the journal Cretaceous Research describes a coelacanth from the Cretaceous Period that may have measured 5 meters in length. Compared to modern day coelacanth, which rarely grow to 2 meters, this specimen is a giant. The animal lived about 66 million…
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Mazon Monday #47: Centipedes
This is Mazon Monday post #47. What’s your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:esconi.info@gmail.com. For this week, we have a very rare Mazon Creek animal. The estimate of occurrence for centipedes was about 3 in 287,000 concretions in the paper “Relative Abundance of Different Mazon Creek Organisms” by Gordon C. Baird and John…
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TheOnion: Chicago Field Museum Director Uses Titanosaur Skull To Hold Parking Space In Snow
From The Onion, we have this… Chicago Field Museum Director Uses Titanosaur Skull To Hold Parking Space In Snow https://bit.ly/3cK9hJr
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PBS Eons: When We First Talked
PBS Eons has a new episode which talks about talking. When did humans first speak? The evolution of our ability to speak is its own epic saga and it’s worth pausing to appreciate that. It’s taken several million years to get to this moment where we can tell you about how it took several…
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Fossil Friday #43: Lung Fish Scales From Mazon Creek
This is the “Fossil Friday” post #43. Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website. We will post any fossil pictures you send in to esconi.info@gmail.com. Please include a short description or story. Check the #FossilFriday Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world! There is a large amount of diversity…
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AMNH: Happy 147th Birthday Barnum Brown… Discoverer of T-rex
Happy Birthday, Barnum Brown! Known as one of the greatest dinosaur collectors of all time, Barnum Brown helped the American Museum of Natural History establish its world-class fossil collection. Brown’s extraordinary fossil-hunting career—which took him from a frontier farm to the world’s top fossil sites and to the halls of the Museum—included the discovery of…
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Happy 211th Birthday, Charles Darwin!
Happy 211th Birthday, Charles Darwin! There are events scheduled for Darwin Day 2021. By Henry Maull (1829–1914) and John Fox (1832–1907)
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Throwback Thursday #45: Collecting Rocks
This is Throwback Thursday #45. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks! This week, we have have a poem from the old ESCONI newsletters. “Collecting Rocks” is from the January…
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The Winfield Mounds
There’s an interesting series on the Winfield Mounds over on the BeHistoric channel on Youtube. The mounds are prehistoric effigy mounds in Winfield Illinois. There are 5 videos – all about 30 minutes long, with the first being an introduction. Part One of the video series in which we explore the history and archeology…
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ESCONI February 2021 General Meeting – February 12th, 2021 at 8:00 PM via Zoom – “Assessing the Early Mars Hydroclimate Using Paleolake Geometries”
Did rainfall and snowmelt fill rivers and lakes on Mars? GETTY Our February 2021 speaker via Zoom will be Dr. Gaia Stucky de Quay from the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin. The topic of her talk will be evidence for water and its effect on the geomorphology of early Mars.…
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Mazon Monday #46: Insects Part 4 – Roachoids
This is Mazon Monday post #46. What’s your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:esconi.info@gmail.com. This week, as part of our series on Mazon Creek insects, we are looking at roaches, or to be more correct roachoids, as true roaches don’t show up in the fossil record until the late Jurassic. Roachoids are the…
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Terrible Lizards Podcast: Spinosaurus Megasode!
The Terrible Lizards podcast has an episode about all things Spinosaur. One of the hosts, David Hone, is a co-author of a recent paper in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica. That paper is entitled “Evaluating the ecology of Spinosaurus: Shoreline generalist of aquatic pursuit specialist?”. It challenges some of the theories in other recent papers that…
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Fossil Friday #42: Acanthotelson stimpsoni
This is the “Fossil Friday” post #42. Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website. We will post any fossil pictures you send in to esconi.info@gmail.com. Please include a short description or story. Check the #FossilFriday Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world! Today’s fossil is a tasty shrimp from…
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Throwback Thursday #44: Commentary: Contributions by Amateur Paleontologists by John Catalani
This is Throwback Thursday #44. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks! The journal Palaeontologia Electronica published the following article in May 2014. It was written by John Catalani, a…
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Status of the 2021 ESCONI Show – October 16th, 2021
The ESCONI show is usually held in each year March. The board evaluated the chances of being able to hold such a show on the usual weekend in March of 2021 and determined that it wasvery unlikely. Other possibilities were considered, such as a virtual show, and rescheduling an in-person show in the fall. The…
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Trilobite Tuesday #32: They Put the Bite in Trilobite
The New York Times Trilobites column has an article about predatory trilobites. While we have learned much about trilobites over the many years of study, there are some aspects of their life that we still don’t know. Those unknowns are mostly associated with soft parts like the guts and delicate parts like the legs and…
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Mazon Monday #45: Insects Part 3 – Gerarids
This is Mazon Monday post #45. What’s your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:esconi.info@gmail.com. The gerarids are large winged insects from the Carboniferous Period. Fossils of gerarids have been found in deposits from Mazon Creek and Commentry, France. The animals are known for a distinctive stalked head. Some have spikes on their thorax. …
