Via the Times of India: … search giant Google posted the year’s first Doodle, marking the 374th birth anniversary of the world famous Danish geologist Nicolas Steno, also known as the father of Geology. Steno is also known for his valuable contribution in the field of anatomy. Today’s Doodle, which spells out the name of the search engine, appears in the form of earth strata with fossils in various bottom layers and a green crust. On clicking the Doodle, users land on the search results page for Nicolas Steno. Born in Copenhagen to a goldsmith family, Steno left the place…

George Langford III writes about the Lesquereux book on Mazon Creek fossils and provides a digitized and cleaned up version of the original book.

Via Christian Science Monitor: Fossil remains of sauropods – dinosaurs with long necks and tails, weighing up to 100 tons – have been found on every continent but one. Now, scientists report unearthing the first evidence of these animals in Antarctica, the last holdout. The Argentine research team is reporting the discovery of a single vertebra and links it to a group of sauropods known as titanosaurs, hefty plant-eaters that were said to dominate the ranks of herbivores during their heyday between 90 million and 65 million years ago….The find, previewed at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology‘s annual meeting in…

The Smithsonian blog has posted a great article about the 2011 in paleontology. google-site-verification: google59dc93f74453c3c5.html

Check out all the dinosaur ornaments on Christmas trees!

Found this personal short description of cutting stone for lapidary.

From Wall Street Journal: The company leading efforts to unlock the U.K.’s potentially vast shale-gas reserves suffered a setback Wednesday after a report found it was “highly probable” a controversial production technique caused two small earthquake tremors in the country earlier this year. The report, which was financed by U.K. energy company Cuadrilla Resources Ltd., pointed to “strong evidence” that the two minor earthquakes and 48 weaker seismic events resulted from Cuadrilla’s pumping drilling fluids used in hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” At the same time, the report said the events were the result of a “rare combination of geological factors.”…

Via ScienceDaily: The crushing pressures and intense temperatures in Earth’s deep interior squeeze atoms and electrons so closely together that they interact very differently. With depth materials change. New experiments and supercomputer computations have revealed that iron oxide undergoes a new kind of transition under deep Earth conditions. Iron oxide, FeO, is a component of the second most abundant mineral at Earth’s lower mantle, ferropericlase….  

Via Science Daily: New research from Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies has revealed how dinosaurs like Velociraptor and Deinonychus used their famous killer claws, leading to a new hypothesis on the evolution of flight in birds…

BoingBoing on the history of birds and dinosaurs: …The connection between dinosaurs and birds, while kind of flipping obvious once somebody points it out, was not much discussed among laypeople until I was in my teens. (That would be the 1990s, FYI.)  But, among scientists, the idea of a dinosaur-bird relationship is nothing new. In fact, Thomas Henry Huxley was making that connection back in the 1860s…