Deposits Magazine - International rock and fossil glossy 52 page publication

Colossal tortoises

Most people are familiar with the famous giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands – isolated oddities evolving in the absence of predators on a remote tropical paradise. However, as little as 5mya, continental landmasses (including Europe, Africa and India) also had their own species of giants. However, these were nearly three times the size of their modern cousins, probably close to the mass of a small car, and would have rivalled some dinosaurs for being among the most colossal reptiles of all time. The best preserved gigantic tortoise fossils (as opposed to the merely ‘giant’ ones) have been found in Mediterranean Europe, particularly France, Greece and Spain, and were described in the scientific literature as early as 1877. Yet, despite an impressive chronicle of discoveries, the inter-relationships between these different kinds of gigantic tortoises are far from adequately understood...

Fossil fish of Scotland

While they can be found in many other parts of the British Isles, Scotland is uniquely associated with Palaeozoic fossil fishes. That Scotland’s fossil fishes are so well known is largely thanks to a remarkable man from Caithness, called Hugh Miller.
Where scholars had dismissed the Old Red Sandstone as lacking in fossils, Miller found many finely preserved fossil fishes. He published several books on field geology including, in 1841, his most famous work, The Old Red Sandstone. This eminently readable book described the formation in great detail and included dozens of beautiful engravings that illustrated the fossil fishes he had discovered.
The Old Red Sandstone is a distinctive set of sandstone rocks dominated by sediments laid down under non-marine, relatively dry climate conditions. It is predominantly Devonian in age, though, in Scotland at least, certain parts may be as old as Middle Silurian. This makes it much older than the formation known as the New Red Sandstone, which was laid down during the Permian...

Dinosaurs at the Nebraska State Capitol

Not many palaeontologists would go on a field trip to the Houses of Parliament in London, but if you do something similar in the state of Nebraska, you will be surprised to find a whole variety of prehistoric life, including dinosaurs, ammonites and trilobites! Within 20 years of its construction in 1889, Nebraska’s second State Capitol was already falling apart. It was also far too small for the needs of a state whose population had nearly doubled in size. In 1919, a bill was passed to fund construction of a new building and architects from across the country submitted designs as part of a formal architectural competition. Most were for designs like those of government buildings elsewhere in the country, based on a classical design, particularly variations of the federal capitol in Washington DC. However, the selected design was a tower-dominated scheme by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue of New York, which combined a variety of styles with elements of Romanesque, Byzantine, Gothic and Art Deco...

“I, a Geologist”: the geology of
Charles Darwin (Part 1)

“Darwin ... devoted 1383 pages of Beagle notes to geological topics, compared with only 368 pages to biological topics.” - (Rhodes 1991, pp. 194-195) - Like the writer Johann Goethe, who inscribed himself in the guest book of Karlsbad – present day Karlovy Vary, in the Czech Republic – as “J.W. Goethe, Geognost”, Charles Darwin considered himself a geologist (“I, a geologist” citation from his notebooks in Herbert 2005, p. 2), and rightfully so. He was a true savant and an amateur in the positive sense of the word, as commonly used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Rudwick 2004, p. 23), this is despite the fact that he belonged, for some time after his return with HMS Beagle, to the geological elite (Rudwick 1982). This may be deduced, for example, from the fact that he was asked to write the part on geology of a naval manual (Darwin 1849). In this article, we will summarise some of Darwin’s more important achievements in geology and the scientific...