Mike Benton Lecture

A few weeks ago Mike Benton gave a lecture to Bristol university alumni. My wife is a Bristol graduate so we watched it and it was very good. Suitable for people of all ages. It is linked to his recent book "The Dinosaurs Rediscovered" and covers the latest scientific advances on dinosaurs.

You can see it HERE and below.

Curling Stones 

A correspondent brought this story to my attention - thank you.

Despite what the man says, it is a microgranite and unusually contains riebeckite and arfvedsonite. The composition and small grain size lead to the curling stone not being prone to chipping. You can read more about the rock HERE.

 Down to Earth Extra April 2024

The April 2024 edition of Down to Earth Extra has been published. You can download it HERE or you can read it below.

How Did Duckbill Dinosaurs Get to Morocco? 

I came across THIS ARTICLE and found it intriguing. Duckbilled dinosaurs are a North American family and they live on land. You can't walk from North America to Morocco. They developed long after the break up of Pangea

North American duckbills are large, the earliest Moroccan ones are small, but they got bigger later. (Geology speak here: later means millennia.)

There are duckbills in Europe, the article does not discuss how they got there. But you could not walk from Europe to Africa at that time - the distance was greater then than now. Tethys was much wider than todays Mediterranean.

So how did they get to Morocco? We do not know how, but they did; the author says that it must be by some extraordinary means. Floating, rafting, swimming are discussed in the article and the author goes on to suggest that freak events, although rare, can have major effects.

Amazing to think what finding a bone can can lead to!

Distribution of duckbill dinosaurs in North Africa and Europe. Nick Longrich

 Anthropocene - the Ongoing Story

The Anthropocene Working Group recently decided not to recognise the existence of the Anthropocene - much to the disgust of some members of the group - see HERE.

If the Anthropocene had been recognised it would have marked the end of the Holocene, the current geological epoch, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the Younger Dryas. There has been much discussion about when the putative Anthropocene would be deemed to start. I had a strange wish to straddle two Geological Epochs! 

The wish for the new epoch has a great deal to do with environmental concerns. Perhaps it should be considered an Event rather than Epoch, similar to the Great Oxygenation Event of the Proterozoic, the Snowball Earth Events and the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. 

And as THIS ARTICLE suggests, global warming has been caused by a small number of people rather than humanity as a whole and would be better named Plutocracene!

 Earliest Forest in the World in Devon and Somerset

A correspondent sent me the link to THIS ARTICLE, for which I am very grateful. The article is based on THIS PAPER. The papers concern newly discovered fossil trees found in Middle Devonian sandstones in the Hangman Sandstone Formation which is of Eifelian age (393 - 387 million years).

Not only were fossilised trees found but also forests. The trees are of an extinct species related to ferns and horsetails - the cladoxylopsids, which look rather like palm trees - long stem (2 - 4m) with "leaves" like palm fronds at the top. (Here "leaves" means lots of twiglets.)

There are older trees to be found but this is the oldest forest. And it marks the time when vegetation had a significant impact on sedimentation, changing the way the non-marine surface of the earth looked. 

The Hangman Sandstone Formation

The tree trunks are preserved mostly as impressions. The most abundant forms show a three-dimensional surface, consisting of longitudinal strips of slightly raised smooth matrix alternating with slightly lower relief strips in which short transverse depressions are closely arranged (A - D). (See pages 12 and 13 of the academic paper)

 Down to Earth Extra March 2024

The March 2024 edition of Down to Earth Extra has been published. You can download it HERE or you can read it below.

 Predicting Volcanism in Iceland

It seems appropriate that the people in charge of predicting eruptions in Iceland work in the Meteorological Office. In Iceland, volcanism is like the weather, there is a lot of it and you can't prevent it but you can give forecasts which are very useful.

THIS ARTICLE in Quanta Magazine is an interesting review of what has happened recently on, and in, the Reykjanes Peninsula of south west Iceland. It seems that there may be several centuries of volcanism to look forward to in the area.

What is evident is that what could have been a deadly catastrophe became a well controlled emergency. - Small eruption in Iceland, nobody dead.

The article is well written so I will not attempt to review the review but would urge you to read it.

A 3-kilometer-long fissure opened up and sent a river of lava flowing over a road in southwest Iceland on February 8, 2024 — right on schedule.

Hilmar Bragi Bárðarson

 Pterosaur from Skye

There has been a lot lately in the media about a pterosaur from Skye. It is based on research, much of which was done at Bristol University. The main academic paper can be seen HERE, the Bristol researcher writes about it HERE and the BBC writes about it HERE.

The fossil in question was found in 2006 at the location shown on the map below.

The fossil took much preparation and was examined in Bristol University's CT scanner. The bones are thin and fragile and the rock matrix hard so getting to the stage of examining the bones took a long time. Read the academic paper to get a flavour of all the work involved.

The main interest of the fossil is that it is more than an isolated bone and that it comes from a geologic period where a lot was happening to pterosaurs but which is poorly represented in the geologic column.

Be amazed at all the measurements the researchers have made. They have decided that it is a new species - Ceoptera evansae.

 Life reconstruction of Ceoptera evansae. Image copyright Mark Witton.

 Looking at Early Life

A sample of chert rock containing what may be the remains of microorganisms that lived 3.4 billion years ago. Dr. Manuel Reinhardt

Around 3.4 billion years ago, Earth hosted diverse communities of life, as evidenced by exceptionally preserved remains revealing a microorganism ecosystem with various sustenance methods. The complexity of this ancient ecosystem suggests that life had likely existed for hundreds of millions of years, starting early in Earth's history.

THIS ACADEMIC PAPER, focused on rocks from the Buck Reef Chert in South Africa, dating back 3.42 billion years. These rocks are believed to be remnants of the shallow seas around a chain of volcanic islands. The layers of rock contain microscopic carbon-based matter, likely the remains of microorganisms from the ancient seas.

Analyzing the chemical makeup of these remains, the researchers honed in on carbon isotopes, specifically carbon-12 and carbon-13. Living organisms prefer carbon-12, and the ratio between the two isotopes provides insights into an organism's metabolism. The material showed a carbon signature consistent with photosynthesis, indicating the presence of vast quantities of photosynthetic microbes near the sea surface billions of years ago.

However, some blobs exhibited lower levels of carbon-12, suggesting a different metabolic process. The authors propose that these microbes were likely feeding on acetyl coenzyme A. Other blobs with even lower carbon-12 levels indicated microbes producing methane or acetate as waste products, which were then potentially consumed by other microbes.

The distribution of these microorganisms is challenging to determine, but it is suggested that photosynthetic ones lived near the water's surface, while others might have resided in seabed sediments. It seems early life functioned similarly to present-day life.

The research also contributes to the growing evidence supporting an early origin of life on Earth, challenging previous fossil record interpretations. While widely accepted evidence for life is around 3.5 billion years old, older fossils from 3.7 billion years ago or earlier have been reported. However, the difficulty in detecting well-preserved rocks from that era makes it challenging to uncover the earliest history of life. But some suggest that life may have emerged during the Hadean eon, around 4.2 to 4.1 billion years ago.

Many readers of this blog will be amazed at the quality of this article. I did not write it! It was written by ChatGPT. I copied THIS ARTICLE from New Scientist and asked ChatGPT to summarise it in about 400 words, and it did it in 359. I modified the output slightly. Be aware that I will not be doing this on a regular basis but did it as an exercise to see the quality of the output - and I am impressed. Back to the less impressive me next time!

 Earth Heritage, Issue 60, Winter 2024

The Winter 2024 issue of Earth Heritage is available for download on THIS PAGE.

Or you can read it below.

 New Dinosaur Species were Evolving when the Asteroid Struck!

Many palaeontologists believe that dinosaurs were on the way out when the asteroid struck at the end of the Cretaceous and the impact was the straw which broke the camels back. (Apologies for the metaphor.)

But THIS ARTICLE contends that new species were continuing to evolve. The perceived decrease in diversity is caused by the difficulty in identifying new species. 

 They illustrate this by describing how museum specimens described as being a juvenile specimen of a recognised species was actually a completely new species which evolved at the relevant time.

And they do this by looking at the spacing of growth rings in the animals bones. If it was a juvenile the rings would be wide - rapid growth. But this animal has closely spaced growth rings indicating it was an adult. 

It had been classified as a juvenile "chicken from hell" Eoneophron anzu. (I think that is the official name of the larger beastie - the article is not very clear on this.) It has been given the name Eoneophron infernalis. 

So new species were evolving right up to the time of the impact.

Teal markers point to lines of arrested growth on the cross-section of fossilized bone. Toward the outside of the bone, the lines are much closer together, reflecting less growth per year. Researchers counted exactly six lines, meaning this animal was between 6 and 7 years old when it died. Holly Woodward

And here is a picture of the animal itself.

Birdlike dinosaur Eoneophron infernalis was about the size of an adult human. Zubin Erik Dutta

 I Won't Live Forever Because of the Dinosaurs!

Mammals were at the bottom of the food chain when dinosaurs were the top predators and therefore to survive mammals became small, nocturnal and short-lived. They had to reproduce rapidly and did not need processes and genes related to long life such as repair and regeneration.

The same cannot be said for reptiles, amphibians and fish. They die from being eaten, not from old age! Many of these continue to reproduce throughout their lives.

I read about this fascinating subject in THIS ARTICLE. 

Dolomite - Solved? 

Many old rocks are dolomite, younger ones are seldom dolomite - why? 

There has been some activity in the dolomite field which shows that you can grow dolomite in the laboratory relatively quickly by repeatedly washing the growing crystal. 

(Dolomite crystals have layers of calcium, carbonate, magnesium, endlessly repeated. In the rocks there is no magnesium in the calcium layers and no calcium in the magnesium layers. Up to now this was impossible to replicate in the laboratory.)

The original paper which tells how to make dolomite is HERE. And "popular" readings of the paper are HERE and HERE and lots of other places.

This is very interesting but I am not sure that it tells us why dolomite is not being made in nature now.

Another annoyance is that the popular papers are obvious copies of each other - they all tell us that the White Cliffs of Dover are dolomite. At least that is not in the original.

 Down to Earth Extra January 2024

The December 2023 edition of Down to Earth Extra has been published. You can download it HERE or you can read it below.