Via InfoMiner: … Workers at U.S. metal mines take home larger paychecks and enjoy more benefits than those at U.S. aggregate and construction materials mines, according to a study by CostMine. The study also found that paychecks were 29% higher on average for hourly workers at the metal mines and 35% higher for salaried workers. The disparity persisted throughout all the job categories with the single exception of environmental coordinators who earn about 5% more on average at aggregate operations.   Not only are paychecks higher at metal mines, but benefits are more generous as well. Workers at metal mines enjoy…

From AP: …Renowned dinosaur hunter Nathan Murphy was sentenced Wednesday to four months in a halfway house and three years probation after pleading guilty to stealing fossils. Murphy was accused of stealing 13 dinosaur bones from central Montana’s Hell Creek badlands in 2006. He pleaded guilty in April to theft of government property. U.S. District Judge Sam Haddon also sentenced him to 300 hours of community service and ordered him to pay $17,325 in restitution…

Via the USGS YouTube Channel, video of a lava flow:

From Journal of Zoology via Science Daily: The largest animals ever to have walked the face of the earth may nothave been as big as previously thought, reveals a paper published June21 in the Zoological Society of London’s Journal of Zoology…

Geologists voted for the Quaternary to begin 2.6 million years ago. Nature via Geology.com

From Science Daily – new paper published in Science identifies cause of global extinction 260 million years ago… ….The eruption in the Emeishan province of south-west China unleashed around half a million cubic kilometres of lava, covering an area 5 times the size of Wales, and wiping out marine life around the world. Unusually, scientists were able to pinpoint the exact timing of the eruption and directly link it to a mass extinction event in the study published in Science. This is because the eruptions occurred in a shallow sea – meaning that the lava appears today as a distinctive…

Via Science Daily : …”As a general rule, I have been anti-drip since my early days as a scientist,” admits Fouch. “The idea of a lithospheric drip has been used many times over the years to explain things like volcanism, surface uplift, surface subsidence, but you could never really confirm it–and until now no one has caught a drip in the act, so to speak.”…  (research published in Nature Geoscience)

A gallery of photos of Brazilian, moss, banded and fortification agate by Professor Richard Weston of Earth Images. (via Geology.com)