Tag: Texas
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Video for ESCONI June 2025 General Meeting – “New discoveries in Inner Space Cavern reveal the animals of Ice Age Texas”
The June 2025 General Meeting was held on June 13th, 2025 via Zoom. Our speaker was John A. Moretti of the Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin. His topic was “New discoveries in Inner Space Cavern reveal the animals of Ice Age Texas“. Summary from John Moretti New discoveries in…
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ESCONI June 2025 General Meeting – June 13th, 2025 – “New discoveries in Inner Space Cavern reveal the animals of Ice Age Texas”
The June 2025 General Meeting will be held at 8:00 PM CDT on June 13th, 2025 via Zoom. Our speaker is John A. Moretti of the Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin. His topic is “New discoveries in Inner Space Cavern reveal the animals of Ice Age Texas“. Since its…
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PBS Terra: Earth’s Worst Mass Extinction is Actually a Warning
PBS Terra has a new video. This one is about the Permian Mass Extinction. There is a surprising natural wonder in the middle of the vast West Texas desert: a prehistoric ocean reef built from the remains of ancient sea life. This fossil-rich landscape tells the story of Earth’s most devastating mass extinction—and can help…
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This 250-Million-Year-Old Reef Became a Mountain in Texas – And It’s Packed with Fossils
SciTechDaily has a piece about the Guadalupe Mountains, which span Texas and New Mexico. There are two National Parks in the Guadalupe Mountains, Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. During the Permian Period, these mountains were part of a reef on the edge of a shallow sea. The area…
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Newly Discovered Fossil from the Smithsonian’s Collection Named After Kermit the Frog
Smithsonian Magazine has an article about a new species named for the Muppet character Kermit the Frog. Kermitops gratus lived during the early Permian in what is now Texas, about 280 million years ago. The paper’s authors Calvin So, Arjan Mann, and Jason Pardo describe the new species as a pro-amphibian. The skull fossil was…
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The Latest Find as Water Levels Fall: Dinosaur Tracks in Texas
The New York Times has a story about the discovery of dinosaur footprints. Severe drought conditions across the world are revealing secrets long covered by water. Just outside of Fort Worth, Texas lies Dinosaur Valley State Park, where dinosaur footprints were recently found after the Paluxy River dried up. The footprints date to about 113 million years…
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Weird Tracks in Texas Indicate Giant Sauropods Walking on Their Front Feet Only
Nature Science Alert has a story about sauropods. Some strange footprints, found near Bandera, Texas back in the 1930’s, could show swimming behavior in sauropods. That theory dates to a letter written by Roland T. Bird in 1940 about front foot only prints made by sauropods. A paper in 2019 reexamined the question, but at…
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NYT: Baby Mammoths Were Meals for These Saber-Tooth Cats
The New York Times Trilobites column has a story about baby mammoths and saber-tooth cats. A recent paper in Current Biology provides evidence of saber-tool cats preying on baby mammoths. The research looked at fossils found in suburban San Antonio, Texas. When most people think of saber-tooth cats, they think of North America’s Smilodon. But…
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SciNews: ‘Shovel-Billed’ Dinosaur Roamed Texas 80 Million Years Ago
SciNews has an article about the discovery of a primitive hadrosaur. The specimen was found and collected in the 1980s and 1990s in Texas and is called Aquilarhinus palimentus. It belongs to Hadrosauridae (duck-billed dinosaurs) a group of plant-eating dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period. The original paper appeared in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology. “Hadrosaurids…
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Ancient “Texas Serengeti” Had Elephant-Like Animals, Rhinos, Alligators and More
The University of Texas (UT News) has a press release about some recent work to catalog and identify a large collection of fossils collected near Beeville, TX during the Great Depression. Described as a “Texas Serengeti”, the collection includes specimens of elephant-like animals, rhinos, alligators, antelopes, camels, 12 types of horses, and several carnivores. In…
