From TED Video Blogs: Bioarcheology is a fairly new field — a subset of anthropology which combines biological anthropology and archeology. It’s the use of biological techniques to look at archeological human skeletons. What bioarcheology does is help recreate lives by examining human remains for clues to what they ate, what they did for work, what illnesses they may have had, what traumas they suffered, how tall they were, whether they were a man or a woman, and their age. .

Arctic ice  lowest since record keeping started. 

Via University of California Santa Cruz:: (hat tip Geology.com) … “It is easy to forget that before 35 million years ago, when the current period of Antarctic glaciations started, this continent was teeming with life,” Tulaczyk said. “Some of the organic material produced by this life became trapped in sediments, which then were cut off from the rest of the world when the ice sheet grew. Our modeling shows that over millions of years, microbes may have turned this old organic carbon into methane.”

Via The Star.com: Jean-Bernard Caron, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, spent seven weeks this summer leading a team on an exploration of the Burgess Shale sites in Yoho National Park in British Columbia. The best-known site is the Walcott Quarry, where there was a major discovery of well-preserved, soft-bodied fossils in 1909. The team found a new site in Kootenay National Park, at a location Caron isn’t ready to reveal yet, with “very rich fossil deposits” from new and existing species. It could be comparable to the original site, said Caron.  

Via Sci-News: (Hat tip Dave Carlson at the ESCONI Yahoo Group): Scientists at the University of Washington suggest that early microbes might have been widespread on land, producing oxygen and weathering pyrite, an iron sulfide mineral, which released sulfur and molybdenum into the oceans.

From PhysOrg: Recently, a mysterious seed fern, Lepidopteris baodensis sp. nov., dating to more than 251 million years ago (Ma), was discovered at the Baijiagou of Baode, Shanxi, China, from the Upper Permian Sunjiagou Formation. This discovery completely changed the understanding of the stratigraphic distribution of the genus Lepidopteris in China and promoted the taxonomic study of late Paleozoic plants. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-mysterious-seed-fern-lepidopteris-upper.html#jCp

From Seattle Times:  An interview with the author of “The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood,” MacArthur Fellow and UW professor David Montgomery….  Q: Most people probably think creationism is a pretty old belief system, but in the book you clearly lay out that it’s not. Briefly describe how it developed. A: George McCready Price was the guy who championed flood geology (the theory that Noah’s flood was real) in its darkest hours through the early 20th century. He was not a trained geologist, but he argued that geologists had the whole theory wrong. His arguments evolved into…

From American Geosciences Institute (AGI), data on when geoscience students got interested in the field of geosciences. 

Via Science Friday:  Reporting in Science, researchers write of sequencing the genome of a young Denisovan girl — an archaic human distantly related to Neanderthals and modern humans. Geneticist David Reich discusses the tale the genome tells about the Denisovan people and their interactions with modern humans.

E-books (self-publishing) are becoming more popular. Here is an e-book being sold on E-bay about Mazon Creek Animal Fossils. The author, TVTesta, is a previous member of ESCONI, as well as speaker to the Paleontology study groups. He is also a subject of a 2004 Chicago Reader article about the Mazon Creek fossils: http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-vanishing-mother-lode-of-mazon-creek/Content?oid=915941 Partial description of Mazon Creek Animal Fossils:  …. The sole purpose of this book is to share photographs of remarkable and interesting museum quality Mazon Creek fossil specimens from the private collection of T.V. Testa.… This volume contains photos of Mazon Creek fossil animals including; the amphibian…

Guatemala has evacuated thousands of people after the Fuego volcano started spewing ash and lava. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-19594481 See also http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=79168 for a view from space.

Via AFP: NASA’s Opportunity rover, older brother to the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars last month, has made a new discovery that geologists find both puzzling and exciting, the US space agency said Friday. Opportunity, which has been on the Red Planet since 2004, has come across an outcrop of tiny spheres — up to around an eighth of an inch (three millimeters) in diameter — the likes of which scientists have never seen before.