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

Tertiary cephalopods, or where did all the ammonites go?

Most geologists will be familiar with Palaeozoic and Mesozoic cephalopods, but their Tertiary counterparts are much less well known. It isn’t that Tertiary cephalopods are rare as such - at some localities they can be quite common - but their diversity is extremely low. For example, the Gault Clay is a Lower Cretaceous formation that has yielded hundreds of cephalopods species, including ammonites, belemnites and nautiloids. Fast-forward to the London Clay, an Eocene formation, and that diversity falls to about five species, at most. At first glance, you would think this reflects the fatal decline of a group marching towards extinction. However, there are 700 cephalopod species alive today, so clearly that isn’t the case. In fact...

Visiting the Zigong Dinosaur Museum

During the 8th International Congress on the Jurassic System 2010, which was held in Shehong, Sichuan Province in China, I had an opportunity to visit several palaeontological museums, exhibitions and geoparks. However, one of them exerted on me incredible impression – the Zigong Dinosaur Museum. The Zigong Dinosaur Museum, known as the ‘Oriental Dragon Palace’, is located at Dashanpu, a town situated 11km northeast of the Zigong City in the Sichuan Province. The museum opened to the public in 1987 and was built on the site where a vast amount of more or less complete skeletons of a diverse range of dinosaurs (as well as other vertebrates) were discovered in the 1970s. It is China’s first museum to be built on the actual burial site of dinosaurs. The museum covers 66,000m2 and the...

Hell’s Gate: Part I

I think it was the name ‘Hell’s Gate’ that attracted us to the place to start with. The Internet, wonderful as it can be, only told us that Hell’s Gate National Park “contained volcanic features”. One was called Fischer’s Tower, where you could climb a sheer face of rock with the help of guides and ropes. The other was a basalt cliff called, uninspiringly, Main Wall. It wasn’t a lot, but we thought it could be worth a look. Last year, my wife (Chris) and I went on a privately organised safari, which combined volcanic scenery and wildlife watching. However, to be honest, for us the game drives were just a diversion from our intended volcano climbs, as the whole area is within the Great East African Rift Valley...

Geological expedition along the southwest coast of Scotland

Compared to the geological architecture of other European countries not exceeding a total area of 100,000km², the geology of Scotland is characterised by an unusual diversity of geological features. Due to its tectono-metamorphic complexity Scotland attracted numerous earth scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, whose main aim was the development of theories about, on the one hand, rock formation and, on the other, metamorphic alteration of initial lithologies. Besides being the preferred target of foreign scientists, the country has also produced its own important figures in the history of geological research. In this context, James Hutton - the “father of modern geology”, after whom...

Plus...

Leedsichthys: a very private suspension feeder

The Triassic of the Carpathian Basin: ancient oceans, ammonites and arguments

Lost Dorset dinosaur footprint site

Colonising skeletal substrates: encrusters and borers from the Upper Jurassic oyster shell beds of Central Poland

And much more...