Category: Around the Web
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Will County Forest Preserve: Silurian Trilobite Souvenirs
Event details ***Please note this program is being offered virtually via Zoom.*** Join Donald G. Mikulic for a fascinating look at the trilobite fossils left behind by the Silurian Sea that was once right here in Will County! Mikulic was a senior paleontologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and served as the curator of…
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PBS Eons: We’re The Only Ones With Chins – And We Don’t Know Why
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about chins and how/why it fits into human evolution. Check out the first episode of Human: https://to.pbs.org/HumanNOVA You share a trait with every single human who’s ever lived – but no other animal on Earth has it. It’s not your big brain, or your opposable thumbs……
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Northwest Illinois Rock Club’s 2025 Jewelry, Gem, Fossil, and Mineral Show – November 8th and 9th, 2025
It you’re up near Freeport, IL the weekend of November 8th and 9th, 2025. This looks like a good time! More information on their Facebook page.
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Happy National Fossil 2025!
Every year the National Park Service picks a park for National Fossil Day. For 2025, it’s the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument (JODA). There are many ways to celebrate the day… see this link. Today, the badlands, sagebrush steppe, and riparian habitats of the John Day River Basin of eastern and central Oregon support diverse…
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BeHistoric: The Great Chicago Portage
Brian and Joyce of the Youtube channel BeHistoric have a fascinating episode about the “Great Chicago Portage”. They layout the history from the Ice Age to the Native American peoples through to modern times. In this video documentary (#89), we explore the great Chicago Portage, used for hundreds or even thousands of years by indigenous…
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Field Museum: Your First Look at the Pokemon Fossil Museum in Chicago!
The actual museum opens on May 22nd, 2026, but the Field Museum has an early look in a new exhibit! In this special exhibition, you’ll immerse yourself in the worlds of Pokémon and natural history with models of fan-favorite Pokémon, real fossil excavation and preparation tools, as well as exhibition soundscapes. Three Field Museum scientists—Arjan Mann,…
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‘Shockingly Beautiful’ Fossil Reveals Oldest Dome-Headed Dinosaur
The New York Times has a fascinating look at beautiful pachycephalosaur specimen from Mongolia. The animal was recently described in a paper in the journal Nature. Zavacephale rinpoche was found in the Gobi Desert by Tsogtbaatar Chinzorig, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University. The name means “root” and “jewel” in Tibetan, which is a…
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‘Rare’ ancestor reveals how huge flightless birds made it to faraway lands
LiveScience has a story that looks a paper about flightless birds and how they may have dispersed across multiple continents. The paper “Quantitative analysis of stem-palaeognath flight capabilities sheds light on ratite dispersal and flight loss” was published in the journal Biology Letters. Ostriches, emus, rheas and other large, flightless birds (paleognaths) are closely related,…
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Digging Wyoming: People Flock To Glenrock To Dig for Dinosaurs In The Dark
Want to dig for dinosaurs? Well… there a place near Glenrock, Wyoming that might be perfect for a vacation next year! Cowboy State Daily has a nice article about it. A plethora of paleontological discoveries continues to shed light on the world of Converse County 67 million years ago. Most of that light is coming…
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Deep-Earth Diamonds Reveal ‘Almost Impossible’ Chemistry
Scientific American has a story about the formation of diamonds. Inclusions are imperfections in gem stones. They are tiny bits of the surrounding rock when the gem or crystal forms. Inclusions in two diamond samples from South Africa are shedding light on how diamonds form deep in Earth’s mantle. The two new diamond samples each…
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PBS Eons: That Time Sharks Got Weird
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the “Age of Sharks” or should it be the “Age of Weird Sharks”. Long before the rise of the great whites and hammerheads we know today, sharks and their cartilaginous relatives ruled Earth’s oceans and rivers in astonishing variety. It was the golden age of…
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How Did Hands Evolve? The Answer Is Behind You.
Carl Zimmer has an interesting post about the evolution of hands. It appears it all started about 360 million years ago… Now the precise DNA-editing technology known as CRISPR is letting scientists reconstruct this ancient evolutionary change in molecular detail. It turns out that hands and feet were not the products of new genes doing new things.…
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PBS NOVA: Human Origins
PBS NOVA has a new 5 part series running on their website and Youtube. The first episode is called “Human Origins”. Check it out! Trace the remarkable origin story of Homo sapiens and the crucial moments that shaped our species. Official website: https://to.pbs.org/46djrws | #novapbs Where do we come from? To find out, journey back…
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Alabama family’s fishing trip leads to 32-million-year fossil find
Yellow Hammer News has a story about an unexpected catch on a family fishing trip in Alabama. They found a 32 million year old (Oligocene) turtle in the bank of the river. It turns out the animal was not known to science and has now been named for their family, Coleman… Ueloca colemanorum. The animal’s…
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Weird Science: Eastern North Carolina dig led to great finds, including fossils from the age of dinosaurs
We received this link the other day. It’s news for Wilmington, but Wilmington North Carolina not Illinois. Still, it’s an interesting story about dinosaurs and fossil collecting. A dig in eastern North Carolina last week had a scientist up to his armpits in mud, and led to some great finds for a museum collection, including…
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How evolution works | Dave Hone and Lex Fridman | on Youtube
David Hone was on the Lex Fridman podcast discussing evolution. Dave Hone is a paleontologist, expert on dinosaurs, co-host of the Terrible Lizards podcast, and author of numerous scientific papers and books on the behavior and ecology of dinosaurs. He lectures at Queen Mary University of London on topics of Ecology, Zoology, Biology, and Evolution.
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PBS Eons: That Time the Earth Was Sticky
PBS Eons has a new episode. This is about Cretaceous amber… what it is, how it forms, and what is found in it. The Cretaceous Resinous Interval, a 54-million year period where amber was preserved in hundreds of locations across the world, was a gooey, gummy point in Earth’s history – and then amber suddenly…
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Paleontologist Mark Norell (Coolest Dude Alive) RIP (1957-2025)
This announcement is from the Witmer Lab at Ohio University. I’m shaken by the news of Mark Norell’s passing—a good friend, a trusted colleague, and a giant in our field. Coincidentally, I got the news as I was working on my talk for the International Symposium on Asian Dinosaurs in Fukui later this month. Here’s…
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Giant Dinosaurs Were Riddled With a Devastating Disease, Fossils Show
Science Alert has a piece about dinosaurs… sauropods might not have been all that healthy. The animals that lived in what is now Brazil, might have suffered from bone infections caused by bacterium, fungus, virus, or parasite.
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Oldest Known Fossil of an Armored Ankylosaur Is ‘Far Weirder’ Than Paleontologists Expected
Smithsonian Magazine has an article about a weird ankylosaur. Its name is Spicomellus afer, and it lived about 165 million years ago during the Jurassic Period. It had three-foot-long spikes around its collar and plates down its shoulders…. great armor against the predators that lived with it in the flood plains of what is now northern…
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The geology that holds up the Himalayas is not what we thought, scientists discover
Live Science has a story about the what is holding up Himalayas and it’s it isn’t what we thought. Scientists had theorized the crumpled region caused by the squeezing of Tibet by the tectonic forces of the Indian sub-continent colliding with the Asia had doubled the thickness of Earth’s crust beneath the Himalayas and Tibetan…
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This Crocodile Relative Was One of Dinosaurs’ Most Fearsome Predators
The New York Times’ Trilobite column has an interesting story about a fierce crocodile that lived alongside the dinosaurs during the Cretaceous Period about 72 million years ago. Kostensuchus measured about 11½ feet long and weighed 551 pounds. The fossils were found in March 2020 in Santa Cruz, a province in Argentina. The animal was…
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Paleontologist Discovers First Known Silurian Horseshoe Crab
SciNews has an article about the discovery of a horseshoe crab fossil in the Silurian. Horseshoe crabs are known from the late Ordovician, but there was a gap of 80 million years from the Devonian. This animal, Ciurcalimulus discobolus, lived about 424 million years ago. It was collected by Samuel J. Ciurca in 1975 from the Kokomo Member…
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Field Museum: After the Age of Dinosaurs
The Field Museum has a new exhibit that looks at the time after the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct during the K-Pg Event about 66 million years ago. How did the world recover? And, how long did it take? Chicago-based illustrator Jay Ryan created original artwork for the Field Museum’s “After the Age of Dinosaurs” exhibition.
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This Tiny Dinosaur Wrist Bone Could Rewrite the Origins of Flight
SciTechDaily has a story that highlights a new dinosaur discovery that might rewrite the evolution of flight. New research by a team led by James Napoli, from the Department of Anatomical Sciences in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, found that some theropod dinosaurs had a bird-like carpal bone, or pisiform. The…
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Fossil Exhibit Transports Visitors To Prehistoric Will County
The Isle a la Cache Museum in Romeoville, IL has a new exhibit “Souvenirs From the Silurian Sea: Fossils of Will County” opening on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025. It’s a free exhibit that runs through November 30th, 2025. The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 AM to 4 PM. WJOL has a nice…
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From Warehouse to Stardom!
From Warehouse to Stardom!by Katherine Howard and Jim BiglerMany years ago, Rusty Grenier, a member of ESCONI, built a Styracosaurus sculpture with his father. After his father died, Rusty donated the sculpture to ESCONI. It was stored at the ESCONI warehouse with care…its future undecided. In March 2025, Katherine Howard and Jim Bigler, both beaming…
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‘Most remarkable’ fossil of Jurassic sea monster from Germany is previously unknown species
LiveScience has a story about a new species of plesiosaur. Plesionectes longicollum, which means to “long-necked near-swimmer”, lived during the early Toarcian age (183 million to 174 million years ago), which is the early Jurassic. The fossil specimen measures about 10 feet long and was found in 1978 from a quarry in Germany, part of…
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Fossil Shows a Sharp-Toothed Mammal That Thrived Among Dinosaurs
The New York Times’ Trilobites column has a piece about the discovery of a new mammal from the late Jurassic of England. It’s called Novaculadon mirabilis, from novacula, the Latin word for razor for its sharp teeth. The animal was about the size of a mouse and lived about 145 million years ago around what is…
