A shutterbug of stone

A macro photo of Ketton Stone, demonstrating the ooliths it is composed of A lot of photos don’t really come out like you hope they  will.  They are fine, yes, but nothing to write home about – bog-standard landscape shots or whatever...   On the other hand, one occasionally does come out like you were really hoping it would, a landscape that takes your breath away or a detail of something you’ve seen.   This was one such photo, and yes, it does look like a certain well-known breakfast cereal!   I don’t think milk would soften it much, though. This particular photo is a macro shot of a piece of oolitic Lincolnshire Limestone, so we are  looking at a fairly small area of it.   The ooliths, which are each smaller than 1mm in diameter, are formed of layers of limestone – calcium carbonate – which have formed around a tiny piece of sand or shell.   I was lucky in that when I took the photo, the sun was shining – the lighting makes all the difference i...

  When you see granite in an urban setting, it's usually a polished slab on the wall of a bank (or former bank which is now occupied by purveyors of mediocre coffee) or rough-dressed as setts.  Sometimes it is scuffed and scratched so still very interesting to look at but not good for photography unless the scuffs and scratches are the subject of the photo. This particular piece, though, is rough-dressed and at a perfect height for photography.   It's in the wall of an extant bank in Peterborough city centre, UK.   It comes from Cornwall (SW England), and it tells a story:   It is a minute part of the Cornubian batholith which shapes the modern landscape; the said batholith was emplaced some 280 million years ago in the early Permian Period as magma solidified underground after the Variscan mountain-building episode further to the south.   Cornwall is a lovely county, famed for its scenery, it's pasties (a historic local food), and its geology.   I h...

If you mis-spent your youth hanging around natural history museums, you've seen a good number of skulls. You've almost certainly seen the cast of a T. rex skull, and probably the skull of an Allosaurus as well; you may have seen the skull of my favourite dino, Stegosaurus, or the pointy Triceratops.  You'll know that Diplodocus had peggy teeth, and that hippos have scary ones. Sabretooth cats were, well, scarytooth cats, and Megalodon teeth are all the more impressive when the teeth of a great white shark are displayed next to them. This, though, is the only skull so far that has made my partner exclaim “What the hell is that ??” when he’s seen the photo on my monitor.  Just look at that jaw mechanism, the pointy head, the spiky bones at the base of the skull.  Do first impressions tell the whole story, though?  What is this, and where does it, or did it, fit into its ecosystem? Gentlebeings, this is the skull of an active predator.   May I introduce you to ...

I had a 'free' afternoon, having a morning in the office that day and an evening meeting in London.  I cleared it with my Team Leader that I'd take the afternoon out  and I made my way to the Natural History Museum to look at the fossil marine reptiles.  After I'd spent quite some profitable time perusing those, I made sure I had a good look at Sophie, the most complete Stegosaurus ever found and the only one on display in Europe. Steggies are my favourite dinosaurs (yes, I'm a grown-up with a favourite dinosaur. I'd bet you a tube of fruit pastilles that I'm not the only one!) so visiting her was a must. After you have been awed by her size and her plates, the one thing you do notice is that she has a tiny 30cm-ish (about 1 foot in British terms), narrow, head in relation to her size. The species name, S. stenops, actually highlights this.    On a balcony overlooking the skeleton, the NHM have a clear Perspex model of a Stegosaurus' skull, and this has ...

Pristine, beautiful, white mud There’s mud, there’s Mud, and then there’s Mud .   There’s your normal mud, like you find in fields; I remember trying to walk my way across a wickedly muddy field with a group of my friends one December day.   The sky was a glorious pale blue, the shadows were seasonally long, but the ground...  Oh dear, the ground.   We were sure there was a path there somewhere  - or so the map was telling us!   It wasn't dignified.   The mud didn’t ruin the walk, but the memory of it does elicit a wry smile.   It was just mud.   The greater memories of that day are the amazing National Trust Property we were going to see, the red kites soaring overhead where we were parked, and the superb lunch in a country pub afterwards.  This was the day I developed a taste for peppercorn sauce. Then there's Mud:   Like the last day of an Open University summer school (SXR260, anyone?) that had otherwise enjoyed d...