Have you tried the Fossil Forum?  Lots of great information on fossils of all types.  There are forums on Fossil Hunting Trips, Fossil ID, Questions & Answers, and Fossil Preparation.  The monthly Fossil of the Month is always amazing.  Fossil Sites is a useful resource to find new places to hunt, either locally or when you are on vacation.  Check it out this winter for great discussion with a bunch of good and helpful people of like mind.  

Spring can’t be too far off, as it sounds like our southern Indiana (and Ohio) neighbours are already out fossil hunting (did they ever stop?).  This story over at Ordovician Weekly is about some Zygospira brachiopods.  Many of you are familiar with these little guys from the “butter shale” off Route 1 near St. Leon, IN.    

Phys.Org has a story about the discovery of one of the Earth’s rarest minerals.  The mineral reidite was found in samples from an impact site in Rock Elm, Wisconsin.    Rock Elm is just the fourth site on Earth where the mineral has been found.  The Rock Elm structure dates to the Middle Ordovician, about 450 million year ago. Aaron Cavosie of the University of Puerto Rico, and member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute Team at the University of Wisconsin, brought students to an impact site in Rock Elm, Wisconsin to collect samples. In those samples, Cavosie and colleagues discovered the…

Looking for reading material this winter?  Researching fossils and artefacts in your collection? Check out Google Books or Google Scholar.  There is a huge amount of material online just waiting to be consumed.  Below you will find just a few of the books to be found; many of them are free.  You can even download PDFs for some.  Happy reading! Mazon Creek Fossils, edited by Matthew H. Nitecki Fossils, The Key to the Past, by Richard Fortey The Bone Sharp, The Life of Edward Drinker Cope, by Jane P Davidson Grave Secrets of Dinosaurs, by Phillip Manning The Life of a…

Legend has it, you will have bad luck if you take rocks from Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park.  The NYT has a story about people that steal and then return their booty to the park.  There’s a nice slide show of some of the returned pieces.  They are interesting specimens, so it’s not too surprising they were pocketed. “Bad Luck, Hot Rocks,” a book edited by the artists Ryan Thompson and Phil Orr and published in November by The Ice Plant, documents more than fifty specimens from the conscience pile, along with some of the letters of apology that accompanied…

Nature has a story of the recent discovery of a cranium which shows that modern humans Homo sapiens were living in the Middle East 55,000 years ago.  The skull bone was found when a cave, which had been sealed for the last 15,000 years, was opened by a bulldozer clearing land for development near the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel.  Amateur speleologists were the first to search the cave, and they spotted the battered bone on a rock ledge.  The Israel Antiquities Authority launched a complete survey and found other artifacts including stone tools.  Parts of the cave are still…

Many of us know that the greek and latin languages are the basis of many species names.  To decode them into their meaning, use these pages: List of Greek and Latin roots and Latin and Greek words commonly used in systematic names Some examples: Triceratops, Tri (three), cera (horn), ops (eye, face), three horned face Tyrannosaurus, Tyranno (absolute ruler, tyrant) saurus (lizard), tyrant lizard Dimetrodon, Di (two), metro (measures), don (dont, tooth), two types of teeth Try it yourself for “Dinosaur”, “Pteradactyl”, “Trilobite”, and “Pecopteris”.    

BBCearth has a cool page called The 25 Biggest Turning Points in Earth’s History.   The list includes events like the formation of the Earth, the great oxidation event, the “Cambrian Explosion”, and various mass extinction events like the “Great Dying” and extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.   It’s well done and includes estimates on when the events happened. There’s a bunch of good content over at BBCearth.