From NBC News: (hat tip Floyd) The folks at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center usually find curious things in the skies — not in their backyard. This summer they uncovered not one, but two dinosaur tracks on the Goddard campus in Greenbelt, Md. The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed the find Thursday.  It’s believed the creatures that left the footprints were nodosaurs…  

Via The Australian: …. AN undersea volcanic eruption has created a raft of porous volcanic rock in the Pacific Ocean that's larger than the surface area of Israel, but navy officers say the phenomenon is not a danger to shipping….     

Via HuffPo: … Armchair archeologists rejoice! A researcher may have made an exciting discovery using Google Earth, a program that allows users to navigate satellite images of the world on their personal computers. Sky News reports that archeology researcher Angela Micol has identified two sites that could show never-before-seen ancient pyramids in Egypt….  

Odd newstory via The Detroit News: … Inspectors with U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped a pair of Canadian citizens at the Ambassador Bridge looking to cross into Detroit on March 28, 2011. The pair claimed to be on their way to a tradeshow in Illinois where they planned to exhibit the 1,100 fossils they had packed in boxes in their vehicle. Border officials dug a little deeper and discovered the fossils were actually going to be sold in the U.S. — something the Canadians had not disclosed. The failure to declare goods for sale resulted in federal officials seizing…

From FoxNews: … “Western North America has been a hotbed for dinosaur discoveries for more than a century, but the recent explosion of new dinosaur species coming out of Utah is sending waves through the paleontological community and revolutionized our understanding of dinosaur evolution on the continent,” researcher Lindsay Zanno said in a statement. Zanno is the director of the Paleontology and Geology Research Laboratory at the Nature Research Center of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.  Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/08/06/dinosaur-boom-linked-to-rise-rocky-mountains/#ixzz236cEP4b7  

Via Geology.com from USGS: … The Lower Brule Sioux Tribe estimates that the Reservation is losing approximately 8 feet of shoreline per year in some locations along the Missouri River in South Dakota. USGS will monitor the erosion using unmanned flights….

Via R&D: … Most earthquakes in the Barnett Shale region of North Texas occur within a few miles of one or more injection wells used to dispose of wastes associated with petroleum production such as hydraulic fracturing fluids, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin. None of the quakes identified in the two-year study were strong enough to pose a danger to the public. The study by Cliff Frohlich, senior research scientist at the university’s Institute for Geophysics, appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “You can’t prove that any…

Via PhysOrg: …For years, many scientists had thought that plate tectonics existed nowhere in our solar system but on Earth. Now, a UCLA scientist has discovered that the geological phenomenon, which involves the movement of huge crustal plates beneath a planet’s surface, also exists on Mars….  “Mars is at a primitive stage of plate tectonics. It gives us a glimpse of how the early Earth may have looked and may help us understand how plate tectonics began on Earth,” said An Yin, a UCLA professor of Earth and space sciences and the sole author of the new research. Yin made…

Another article on yesterday’s topic. This time from by Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News:  … A new species of human: One of several co-existing in Africa two million years ago Researchers studying fossils from northern Kenya have identified a new species of human that lived two million years ago. The discoveries suggest that at least three distinct species of humans co-existed in Africa. 

From AP via Washington Post: (hat tip Floyd) …In their new findings, the Leakey team says that none of their newest fossil discoveries match erectus, so they had to be from another flat-faced relatively large species with big teeth. The new specimens have “a really distinct profile” and thus they are “something very different,” said Meave Leakey, describing the study published online Wednesday in Nature. What these new bones did match was an old fossil that Meave and her husband Richard helped find in 1972 that was baffling. That skull, called 1470, just didn’t fit with Homo erectus, the Leakeys…

Via Blackhills Travel Blog: …the story behind this exciting new scientific undertaking, involving a seven-year-old girl who “did the right thing,” is equally unusual. Kylie Ferguson was hiking a short distance from the center with her mother when she noticed a white, shiny knob of “something” sticking out of the ground. She had just finished listening to a park ranger tell her group of Junior Paleontologists what to do if they found a fossil. So instead of disturbing that little white knob, Kylie went back to the visitor center and wrote up a detailed report about her find. The park’s…

Via FoodGawker: How to Make a Paleontology cupcake.   

Via ABC News: … A paleontologist who undertook a major excavation of ice age fossils of mammoths and mastodons in Colorado was named the next director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History on Thursday. Kirk Johnson, currently chief curator and vice president of research at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, will take command of one of the nation’s most visited museums in late October.  

Via NYTimes (hat tip Dave Carlson over at the Yahoo Discussion Group): … Geneticists studying DNA now say that, to the contrary, a previously unknown archaic species of human, a cousin of the Neanderthals, may have lingered in Africa until perhaps 25,000 years ago, coexisting with the modern humans and on occasion interbreeding with them…. Interesting fact: Bernard Wood, mentioned in the article, is a friend and an associate of Becky Ackermann, daughter of the Rogers (ESCONI members).

From the Gemological Institute via Geology.com: An article in the Gemological Institute of America Insider newsletter tells how Vincent Pardieu, supervisor of field gemology for GIA, searches for gemstones in Afghanistan.

Over at the ESCONI Yahoo Group, Dave Carlson has put forward this post:  Does anyone know what fossils are found only in Illinois? I think that the Ordovician cystoid Lepadocystis decorus is one, and maybe some Mazon fossils would also qualify. Anybody know specifically which ones? Any others outside of Mazon?

Via CBC: Researchers from the University of Saskatchewan along with the Geological Survey of Canada have discovered the country’s 30th meteor impact crater — a 25-kilometre astrobleme created more than 100 million years ago in the Arctic. The pit-like hole created by the impact of a meteor is in the northwestern part of Victoria Island, and located between Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.    

Via Wall Street Journal – a nice graphic of mineral resources left to be found –  Mining companies estimate the Earth contains enough of certain minerals to last hundreds of years, and that available reserves will be better used thanks to techniques such as drilling deeper and mining in largely untapped places, such as Greenland, Mongolia and the Arctic. See available reserves and read about the minerals.