Geology Page has piece on the April 1st earthquake in Chile.  The quake, an 8.2, occurred in a gap on a fault unruptured since 1877.  The current thinking is it didn’t release stress in the right place and may have opened the possibility of another large quake. “We assumed that the area of the 1877 earthquake would eventually rupture, but all indications are that this 8.2 event was not the 8.8 event we were looking for,” said Kevin P. Furlong, professor of geophysics, Penn State. “We looked at it to see if this was the big one.” But according to…

National Geographic has a great story and video about the shrinking ice in the Arctic.  Many want to deny the warming planet, but the evidence is obvious when you look at the extent of ice in the Arctic Ocean. Unveiling his most aggressive plan yet to combat climate change, President Obama on Monday referenced recent dramatic changes that National Geographic made to its atlas because of melting sea ice. “Shrinking ice caps forced National Geographic to make the biggest change in its atlas since the Soviet Union broke apart,” Obama said during a speech at the White House. He’s right.…

The Field Museum Science NewsFlash blog has a great post about a recent donation of Mazon Creek fossils.  The Thomas V. Testa collection of Mazon Creek fossils was just received from Field Associate (and ESCONI member) Jack Wittry.  It’s probably one of the largest private and certainly one of the best collections.  The donation, which consists of about 7000 Mazon Creek fossils, brings the Field Museum’s total to over 50000 specimens. Mazon Creek, an area about 50 miles southwest of Chicago, is one of the richest fossil sites in the world. It was once the swampy coastline of a warm…

Devonian land plants caused ecological havoc (Credit: Walter Myers/SPL) The BBC Earth Blog has a story about the Devonian mass extinction, which is one of the least understood of the great extinction events in Earth’s history.  In new research, Matt Algeo has proposed that vascular land plants were the cause.  The vascular land plants evolved during the Devonian Period.  Their roots penetrated the ground, breaking up rocks.  This process would have released minerals and nutrients that eventually made it to the oceans.  This could have led to algal blooms, which in turn led to “anoxic dead zones”, as we see today with…

The Atlantic’s CITYLAB blog has a story about an interesting effort to map “The United States of Fossiliferousness”.  Cason Clagg is a fossil fanatic.  He’s a software developer and lives in Southern Oklahoma.  He wants to map where fossils are found.  He used data from the Paleobiology Database, which coincidently was inspired by David Raup’s work at the University of Chicago.   There are several versions of the map.  And, for those of you with an iphone, he plans to release an iphone app at some point in the future.  

A marrellomorph arthropod, probably belonging to the genus Furca. c. Credit: Peter Van Roy   ScienceDaily has a story about some spectacular new fossils from Morocco.  These fossils are from the lower Fezouata formation, which dates to Ordovician.  In the five years since its discovery, the Fezouata has revealed 160 new genera, with even more expected.  Many of these animals are holdovers from the Cambian and were thought to be extinct long before this younger time period, about 20 million years younger.   The original paper appeared in the Journal of the Geological  Society on July 8th. The Lower Fezouata formation has…

Credit: Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazine Quanta Magazine has an interesting article on the evolution of birds.  It’s pretty commonly known that birds are dinosaurs, theropod dinosaurs.  That group includes some huge monsters like Tyrannosaurus rex.  Even the closest relatives to birds were quite large, at 100 to 500 pounds.  With the greater understanding of genetics and evo-devo, the story of how a line of dinosaurs shrank and evolved into birds is becoming much clearer. For decades, paleontologists’ only fossil link between birds and dinosaurs was archaeopteryx, a hybrid creature with feathered wings but with the teeth and long bony tail of…