From Smithsonian.org: By the last day, my brain ached with details of flying Microraptor, bounding crocodiles, marsupial bone microstructure and dozens of other topics. When my friends at the conference asked “What did you like best?” after the technical sessions finally concluded, I was only capable of grunts and indelicate gestures. I’ve had a day to settle down and process what I saw. And I know this–at SVP, dinosaurs rule. This isn’t to say that the conference is all about the Mesozoic celebrities. I saw many excellent talks on prehistoric fish, mammals, amphibians and other forms of ancient life. But,…

Via Discovery.com hat tip to Dave Carlson over at the ESCONI Yahoo Discussion Group The buttes last erupted between 940 and 0 B.C., not 30,000 years ago, as previously thought, a new study detailed online Oct. 15 in the journal Geology reports. The new age — which makes these some of California’s youngest volcanoes — pushes the volcanic quintuplets into active status. The California Volcano Observatory, launched in February by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), already lists the area as a high threat for future blasts.

From PhysOrg: Paleontologist Denver Fowler has told a group of attendees at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting that he, along with colleagues from the Museum of the Rockies, has uncovered evidence that suggests Tyrannosaurus Rex pulled the head off Triceratops victims to allow access to nutritious neck meat. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-10-life-death-triceratops-fossilized-tooth.html#jCp

Via National Geographic: One of the world’s oldest types of fish, coelacanths (pronounced SEE-la-kanths) are primitive, slow-moving fish that had been thought extinct until an individual was found off Africa in 1938. There are now over 40 known coelacanth species. The two that live today are called living fossils because they have remained virtually unchanged for 320 million years. The newfound coelacanth has been dubbed Reidus hilli in honor of its discoverer Robert Reid, an artist who found the fish’s fossilized skull near his home in Forth Worth, Texas, in the late 1980s….  

From the Bullion Vault: MILLIONS of years ago tectonic events created significant gold and silver mineralization in the Guerrero Gold Belt in Mexico. Today, two gold companies have reported 16 Moz of gold there, and other discoveries are sure to follow. In this interview with The Gold Report, Merrill McHenry, an independent analyst and geologist, explains the region’s geology and prospect potential. The Gold Report: Merrill, speaking as a geologist, what makes the Guerrero Gold Belt in Mexico so highly prospective for gold and silver mineralization? Merrill McHenry: Two words: plate tectonics. Two tectonic events in that area of sufficient…

From the Bankok Post: Archaeologists in eastern Bulgaria say they have unearthed the oldest prehistoric town ever found in Europe, along with an ancient salt production site that gives a strong clue about why massive riches were discovered in the region….

From Wiley via geology.com: The Chinga meteorite fell near the border of what is now Siberia and Mongolia at least 10,000 years ago. Researchers have recently linked a 10.6 kilogram sculpture to the meteorite through geochemical testing and to a culture of the eleventh century located in the fall area through ethnological analysis. Interesting even if you think it is somewhat speculative.     

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.