A shutterbug of stone

  While I have been 'curating' - she says grandly - photos to put on this blog, I've been reminiscing about when I took some of them.  Take this one, for example:  I was on an Open University geology summer school (SXR260, anyone?), and it was the first time I had been to Teesdale (County Durham, in northern England). One of our field trips was to see the Whin Sill (a lens-shaped igneous rock intrusion that took place in the  late Carboniferous ). There's an amazing exposure of the sill here at High Force Waterfall!  I can just imagine the heat of the magma as it forced its way through the country rock, and the cracking, creaking and groaning as it happened.  The basalt columns, by the way, are the same structures formed by the dolerite cooling that you see at Fingal's Cave and the Giants' Causeway.  Further along the Tees, at Low Force, you can walk across the exposed tops of such columns to see the hexagonal shape of the columns from above. I was...

You've just got to love Portland Stone, with its distinct facies.  This is grove whitbed, a Jurassic limestone famous for being absolutely full of oysters.  I took this one, I think, at Green Park tube station in London. The station entrance, on Piccadilly, is literally a work of art; called Sea Strata, it was created by John Maine RA with the building clad in different facies of Portland Stone. This is the highly fossiliferous Grove Whitbed, which is full of oyster shells.

We (the local geology and palaeontology group) were in a huge quarry In Rutland one Saturday. We'd been collecting marine invertebrate fossils in the morning - I'd collected enough fossil shellfish to make a decent gumbo.  There were mussels, horse mussels, clams, sea urchins, all from a warm, tropical sea in the Jurassic, all living in their own trophic niches.  Some of my friends found fish teeth – bony fishes and hybodont (peg-toothed) sharks. During the morning, the sky had become more threatening, and we had to run to try (and fail) to avoid the downpour that came with a thunderstorm.  Luckily, this quarry has excellent facilities including a warm, dry room with a coffee machine, chairs and tables. It’s not a pretty room but it’s a very welcome one.  Anyway, this was a good time to have lunch, so we did, then we started to move out to another area with rocks and fossils deposited in a freshwater environment. I was a little behind some of the others, as I’d s...

I grew up reading about the coelacanth and about how it had been rediscovered in 1938 when it was thought to have become extinct millions of years ago.  When I first saw this specimen, in London's Natural History Museum a mere decade ago, my first reaction was an almost child-like wonder.  Here in the actual flesh was this living fossil (well, this example wasn't living, obviously...).  It was a solid, primitive, hefty-looking fish and looking at it felt like looking at a living dinosaur.  Yes, I know...  It is fair to say that as a species it isn't an underwhelming fossil fish this month (if you know, you know) or any other month. My second reaction was that it actually looks rather sorry for itself and this particular one is in fact underwhelming.  Like everything else that has been 'pickled' the way this one has, it has become pale and colourless over time. It really is a shame - and not just because live ones are the most amazing blue that would sui...