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PBS Eons: Darwin Missed An Example of Evolution Right Under His Nose
Read more: PBS Eons: Darwin Missed An Example of Evolution Right Under His NosePBS Eons has a new episode. This one discusses some evidence of evolution that was missed by Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin encountered a tiny fox-like creature during his famous voyage but instead of discovering its fascinating evolutionary story, he just knocked it on the head with his geology hammer.
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Fossil Friday #131: Tully Monster!
Read more: Fossil Friday #131: Tully Monster!This is “Fossil Friday” post #131. Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website. We will post any fossil pictures you send in to esconi.info@gmail.com. Please include a short description or story. Check the #FossilFriday Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world! Who doesn’t love a Tully Monster?… especially a stunning one?!? This Tully was found in Pit 11 by ESCONI member Gary Crouse, He showed it to me at the Mazon Creek Open House and I just couldn’t resist getting a photo for Fossil Friday. Just in case you are new to Mazon Creek…
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Throwback Thursday #133: To a Fossil
Read more: Throwback Thursday #133: To a FossilThis is Throwback Thursday #133. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks! For this week’s Throwback Thursday, we have a nice little poem called “To a Fossil” from the May 1984 edition of the ESCONI newsletter. The poem is attributed to Donna Dempsey. No other information is available about Donna. Please let us know if you know of her and how she was involved with ESCONI. To a Fossil Small Creature,who lived long agobeneath a…
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MAPS 2022 “Lagerstatten” – October 21-23, 2022, Illinois State Fairgrounds, Springfield, IL
Read more: MAPS 2022 “Lagerstatten” – October 21-23, 2022, Illinois State Fairgrounds, Springfield, ILThe MAPS show is this weekend in Springfield, IL. It’s always a great show! Make sure you don’t miss it! The MAPS show will be held from October 21nd to 23rd, 2022 in Springfield, IL. DATES: October 21-23, 2022. LOCATION: EXPO XLIII will be held at the Orr Building located on the Illinois State Fairgrounds, 801 E Sangamon Ave., Springfield, Illinois (see Map p. 5). This facility has approx. 39,000 sq ft of floor space and is heated and air conditioned with restrooms and a finished kitchen. It is complete with two overhead doors and a loading dock for easy entry. Additionally,…
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Video for the ESCONI September 2022 General Meeting – “Paleozoic fishes of the Illinois Basin”
Read more: Video for the ESCONI September 2022 General Meeting – “Paleozoic fishes of the Illinois Basin”The September 2022 General Meeting was held on Friday, September 9th, 2022. The presenter was Dr. Ryan Shell of the Cincinnati Museum Center. The title of his talk was “Paleozoic fishes of the Illinois Basin”. Dr. Shell is a research associate in the department of vertebrate paleontology at the Cincinnati Museum Center and a Paleontological Resources Assistant at the United States Forest Service. He does research in paleontology, systematics, taxonomy, biostratigraphy and biogeography. Topic: Paleozoic fishes of the Illinois BasinPresented By: Dr. Ryan Shell
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Mazon Monday #134: 2022 Mazon Creek Open House Report With Videos
Read more: Mazon Monday #134: 2022 Mazon Creek Open House Report With VideosThis is Mazon Monday post #134. What’s your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks! The 2022 Mazon Creek Open House was held on Saturday, October 15th, 2022 at Cantigny Park in Wheaton, IL. It was a rousing success! We had around 100 visitors throughout the day. There was plenty to talk about as we had three display cases of fossils – two from the Field Museum, which included the holotype for Exessella asherae and one case of fossils from ESCONI members Keith Robitschek, Andy Jansen, and Rich Holm. Here are a few random photos from the day. We…
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Astonishing dinosaur mummy has ‘glittering’ skin that was punctured and ripped by ancient crocs
Read more: Astonishing dinosaur mummy has ‘glittering’ skin that was punctured and ripped by ancient crocsLiveScience has a story about “Dakota” a dinosaur mummy from North Dakota. “Dakota”, a duck-billed dinosaur that lived about 67 million years ago in what is now North Dakota, is a mummified dinosaur which exhibits evidence of predatory behavior in its remains. A paper in the journal PLOS One describes this evidence and proposes that dinosaur mummification may be somewhat common. “There used to be an assumption that, in order to get a mummy, you absolutely had to have rapid burial,” meaning the dinosaur would have to be buried almost instantaneously at or near its time of death, said Stephanie…
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ESCONI Mazon Creek Open House October 15, 2022
Read more: ESCONI Mazon Creek Open House October 15, 2022Today is the day! Hope to see you there! The Mazon Creek Open House is October 15th, 2022 from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM at Cantigny Park in Wheaton, IL. The Mazon Creek Open House is returning for 2022! If you’ve been a Mazon Creek collector (or even just a passing fan), you may have heard of the Mazon Creek Open House. It was an annual affair, usually held in October at places as varied as the Burpee Museum, the Lizzadro Museum, and even the Elgin Public Library. There were quite a few events in the 1990’s and early 2000’s…
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Fossil Friday #130: Mariopteris nervosa
Read more: Fossil Friday #130: Mariopteris nervosaThis is “Fossil Friday” post #130. Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website. We will post any fossil pictures you send in to esconi.info@gmail.com. Please include a short description or story. Check the #FossilFriday Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world! Today, we have multiple Mariopteris nervosa seed fern fossils from Ralph Jewell. These are stunning specimens. Mariopteris are fairly rare and usually preserved in 3-D. Ralph recently purchased an amazing collection. He has been documenting it over on the Fossil Forum. Check out his long running and interesting thread. Thanks for sharing, Ralph!
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Throwback Thursday #132: Mazon Creek Open House Videos
Read more: Throwback Thursday #132: Mazon Creek Open House VideosThis is Throwback Thursday #132. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks! Don’t forget the 2022 Mazon Creek Open House this Saturday, October 15th, 2022! Long time ESCONI member Ralph Jewell took videos at some past Open House events in the 1990’s and 2000’s. Thanks, Ralph! It’s very interesting to look back. Here are a few highlights. You’ll see some current members looking very young. I attended the 2006 and 2007 events. Which ones did you attend? …
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Happy National Fossil Day 2022!!!
Read more: Happy National Fossil Day 2022!!!Featuring an Eocene forest in celebration of the 150-year anniversary of Yellowstone National Park and the park’s fossil heritage. Happy National Fossil Day! The National Park Service has a page dedicated to the very special day. There are events scheduled all around the country. ESCONI celebrates fossils every week. Check out our features Mazon Monday, Throwback Thursday, and (of course!) Fossil Friday! Don’t forget the Mazon Creek Open House this Saturday, October 15th, 2022! Celebrate Our Geologic Heritage During 2022 we celebrate the 13th Anniversary of National Fossil Day! Join paleontologists, educators, and students in fossil-related events and activities across…
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‘Sea monsters’ were real millions of years ago. New fossils tell about their rise and fall
Read more: ‘Sea monsters’ were real millions of years ago. New fossils tell about their rise and fallThe Conversation has an article about the latest mosasaur discoveries. Mosasaurs grew to length of 12 meters or more and are related to modern day snakes and lizards. Had they survived, we would be calling them real-life sea monsters. The discovery of a new species, Thalassotitan atrox, lived 66 million years ago right up to the K-Pg mass extinction. It gives a view into the health of the marine ecosystems at the end of the Cretaceous. Sixty six million years ago, sea monsters really existed. They were mosasaurs, huge marine lizards that lived at the same time as the last…
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Mazon Monday #133: Mazon Creek Open House History
Read more: Mazon Monday #133: Mazon Creek Open House HistoryThis is Mazon Monday post #133. What’s your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:esconi.info@gmail.com. This post included material provided by Ralph Jewell, John Liskey, and David Duck, Thanks! The Mazon Creek Open House started in the early 1985. It was an extension of the Mazon Creek Project at Eastern Illinois University. We posted about that in Mazon Monday #5. The Mazon Creek Project was a program sponsored by Northeastern Illinois University. Founded in the 1960s, by the late Eugene Richardson Curator of Fossil Invertebrates at the Field Museum in Chicago Illinois. It was originally an attempt to encourage…
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Fossils Reveal Pterosaur Relatives Before They Evolved Wings
Read more: Fossils Reveal Pterosaur Relatives Before They Evolved WingsThe New York Times Trilobites column has a story about pterosaur origins. Paleontologists have long wondered about the evolutionary ancestors of pterosaurs as the animals were most likely small and thus less likely to fossilize. A paper in the journal Nature proposes that Scleromochlus taylori is one of the missing ancestors. It lived about 237 million years ago in what is now northern Scotland. The fossils, which are encased in hard sandstone, were found in the early 1900’s. Few creatures were built to soar like pterosaurs. Tens of millions of years before the earliest birds, these Mesozoic reptiles had pioneered flight with sail-shaped wings and lightweight bones.…
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PBS Eons: Our Ancient Relative That Said ‘No Thanks’ to Life on Land
Read more: PBS Eons: Our Ancient Relative That Said ‘No Thanks’ to Life on LandPBS Eons has a new episode on Youtube. This one is about a particular tetrapod that seems to have returned to the ocean after venturing onto land. Around the time that some of our fishapod relatives were crawling out of the water, others were turning around and diving right back in.
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Fossil Friday #129: Cyclopteris orbicularis
Read more: Fossil Friday #129: Cyclopteris orbicularisThis is “Fossil Friday” post #129. Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website. We will post any fossil pictures you send in to esconi.info@gmail.com. Please include a short description or story. Check the #FossilFriday Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world! For this week, we have a large Cyclopteris orbicularis from the Mazon Creek fossil biota. It was sent our way by Ralph Jewell, who found it this summer at the Pit 3 fossil locality. This is a beautiful, well preserved specimen. It’s rare to find one this large and intact. For more information,…
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Throwback Thursday #131: Looking Back at ESCONI for October 2022
Read more: Throwback Thursday #131: Looking Back at ESCONI for October 2022This is Throwback Thursday #131. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks! 25 Years Ago – October 1997 50 Years Ago – October 1972 70 Years Ago – October 1952
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Haul of Fossil Fish Pushes Back the Origin of Teeth and Jaws
Read more: Haul of Fossil Fish Pushes Back the Origin of Teeth and JawsSmithsonian Magazine has a post about some amazing fish fossils. A series of papers published in the journal Nature shed light on the evolution of teeth and jaws. The discovery of these fossil fish from the Silurian of China has pushed back the oldest jawed fish to about 436 million years ago. Previously, the oldest known jawed vertebrate was 425 million years ago. There are instructive twitter threads by Matt Friedman and Ron Sansom. Our teeth and jaws are incredibly ancient. They’re older than dinosaurs, older than arms and legs, older than trees–adaptations that paleontologists have tracked to our distant,…
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Mazon Monday #132: Homaloneura dabasinskasi
Read more: Mazon Monday #132: Homaloneura dabasinskasiThis is Mazon Monday post #132. What’s your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:esconi.info@gmail.com. Homaloneura dabasinskasi was described by F. M. Carpenter in 1964. The paper “Studies on North American Carboniferous Insects. 3. Spilapterid From the Vicinity of Mazon Creek, Illinois (Palaeodictyoptera)” appeared in the Entomology Journal Psyche. Frank M. Carpenter was an absolute giant in the field of both entomology and paleoentomology (insects). He wrote Chapter 14A “Insecta” in the “Richardson’s Guide to the Fossil Fauna of Mazon Creek” not long before he died in 1994 at age 91. There have been many species named for him…
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Opulent Opal
Read more: Opulent OpalJewellery World in Australia has a post about opals. Opals are beautiful precious stones found all over the world. Ethiopia along with Lightning Ridge in Australia are very famous for black opals. The Roman scholar Pliny observed in 79 AD, “Some opali carry such a play within them that they equal the deepest and richest colours of painters.” Popular around the world, it was called úpala in Sanskrit meaning “precious stone”, and opalus in Latin and Opallios in Greek, both meaning “colour change”. The earliest known artifacts of opal were found in a cave in Kenya by famed anthropologist, Louis…
ESCONI Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Show
Most Recent Post
- Fossil of Pincer-Wielding Crawler Reveals Origins of Spiders, Scorpions and Others
The Trilobites column over at the New York Times has a interesting story about the origin of chelicerates – spiders, scorpions, mites, horseshoe crabs, and others. Chelicerates are a diverse group of arthropods that consists of more than 120,000 known species. Member of this group are classified by having a pair of appendages called chelicerae. These appendages are adapted for various purposes like snatching prey, injecting venom, and even spinning silk.
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Field trips require membership, but visitors are welcome at all meetings!
| Friday, April 10th | General Meeting – 8:00 PM via Zoom. Jessica Hull will present “Life in the Devonian Period, The Age of Fishes.” |
| Saturday, April 11th | Junior Study Group Meeting – 2:00 PM, in person at the College of DuPage Technical Education Center (TEC) Building – Room 1038A (Map). Katherine Howard will present on Sand and Sediment Collecting. Specifics of this meeting are available from Scott Galloway, 630-670-2591, gallowayscottf@gmail.com. |
| Saturday, April 18th | Paleontology Study Group – 7:30 PM via Zoom and in person at the College of DuPage, TEC, Room 1038B (Map). Keith Robitschek will present “Digging the Marl of the Lance Formation.” |
| No meeting this month | Mineralogy Study Group |
| No meeting this month | Junior Study Group |