Deposits Magazine - International rock and fossil, glossy 52 page publication

The fossil lions of Europe

The lion (Panthera leo) can rightly claim to be the most oft-invoked animal in all of human culture. Whether praising someone as leonine or lion-hearted, or throwing them to the lions, the second largest of felines has the ability to evoke emotions that the tiger (Panthera tigris), leopard (Panthera pardus) and jaguar (Panthera onca) simply do not. This entwined history stretches at least as far back as the late Pleistocene (100,000 to 10,000 years ago) and possibly as far back as the late Pliocene (about 3.5mya), when the lion lineage first split from the other pantherine cats. We tend to think of the lion as a quintessentially African animal and, indeed, this is where the vast majority of lions survive today. However, the tiny enclave....

Fossil insects from the Lower Cretaceous of Southern England

It was over 150 years ago that the first major work began on the fossil insects of the Lower Cretaceous of England. The pioneers were Victorian naturalists, including the Rev Osmond Fisher, John O Westwood and, in particular, the Rev Peter Bellinger Brodie. 1845 saw the publication of Brodie’s A History of the Fossil Insects in the Secondary Rocks of England, the earliest English language book on fossil insects and the first major study of the fossil insects of England. The Victorians collected and described many species from Wiltshire, Dorset and the Weald, and started the ball rolling for British palaeoentomology...

Fossil fakes and their recognition

Ever since fossils first attracted the attention of mankind, they have been traded and, with the emergence of this commerce, so fossil fakes have appeared. The number of such fakes and their geographical origin has increased with time. On the one hand, this parallels the large demand for fossils; on the other, it reflects the outlawing of fossil sales in some countries, combined with the economic needs of many families, who use fossils as their main source of income. This trend will continue, as the supply of genuine fossils diminishes due to trading restrictions. In particular, it will continue as borders, which were once freely open to nomadic movements become heavily policed, along with a decrease in open collecting sites...

Two days of trawling in the Eurogully: Did trawler OD7 find a mammoth graveyard?

The first finds of mammoth fossils and other representatives of the ice age megafauna occurred in 1874. It was assumed then that there must have been a mammoth graveyard offshore of the province of Zeeland in The Netherlands. To date, many thousands of megafaunal remains have been collected from the seabed, and not just woolly mammoths. They include woolly rhinoceroses, steppe bison and wild horses, in most cases as an auxiliary catch during trawling (for instance, see Mol et al., 2008). This is because, when fishing in the North Sea, fishermen tow ‘trawls’ (fishing nets) along the seafloor to catch flatfish like sole and plaice. This process is often referred to as “dragging”. However the nets also stir up a lot of debris...

Plus...

A Palaeocene Lagerstätte in France

The Cretaceous of the Carpathian Basin: Hungarian fossil reptiles from Iharkút

Hell’s Gate - part II

New predator “dawn runner” discovered in early dinosaur graveyard

And much more...