FossilHub – Page 2 – PALAEONTOLOGY (AND GEOLOGY) CENTRAL

May 23, 2020

Trapped Wind

The Fascinatingly Fortuitous Fossilization of Farts There are people out there who don’t think palaeontology is astonishing, and they are quite wrong. To prove this, here is a 20 million-year-old cockroach fart, fossilized in amber: The late lamented Dr WHO once told me “serendipity is looking for a needle in a haystack and finding the famer’s daughter.” I think my...

Media/Outreach/Research/Teaching

May 21, 2020

Rolling with dinosaurs

After Chalking With Dinosaurs with Burnsy on BBC Radio Humberside this week, I intended my next post to be on the Megalosaurus trackways of Oxfordshire. However, my better half then showed me this video: We immediately found ourselves thinking: “That would be cool with dinosaur feet!” Then we thought “Actually, it would be cooler with correctly sized dinosaur feet that...

#ChalkingWithDinosaurs/Outreach/Teaching

May 19, 2020

Chalking With Dinosaurs, part 4

I don’t even work on dinosaurs, and here I am, yet again, writing about the crunching great lizard monsters and their footprints. It’s all a very elaborate ruse to get you hooked on ichnology, such that I can then start making videos such as Crawling With Ragworms and Irrigating With Thalassinids. Hey ho, it’s all good fun, and here we...

#ChalkingWithDinosaurs/Media/Outreach/Teaching

May 12, 2020

Chalking With Dinosaurs, part 3

On Saturday May 9th 2020, as promised, I chalked a load of dinosaur footprints onto my driveway. My video below explains what I did, and what a single footprint can tell us about the tracemaker. WARNING: this video features some low-quality singing. If you want to go chalking with dinosaurs, here’s my checklist: 1. Choose a footprint you want to...

#ChalkingWithDinosaurs/Media/Outreach/Teaching

May 9, 2020

Chalking With Dinosaurs, Part 2

As GeoWeek 2020 starts on Saturday May 9th, so does Chalking With Dinosaurs. And since we can’t all go to the Dinosaur Coast this weekend and hunt fossilized footprints, let’s bring the dinosaurs to our streets, our driveways, and our houses. My video below gives an introduction to Chalking With Dinosaurs, and the science of ichnology. The Jurassic rocks of...

#ChalkingWithDinosaurs/Outreach/Teaching

May 4, 2020

Chalking With Dinosaurs

The Yorkshire Coast is one of the best places in the world to walk with dinosaurs. The Jurassic rocks exposed between Staithes and Scarborough have yielded huge numbers of fossil dinosaur footprints, and scientists from all over the world come to North Yorkshire to better understand how dinosaurs lived and behaved. In the absence of being able to go and...

#ChalkingWithDinosaurs/Media/Outreach/Teaching

March 2, 2020

How to map volcanoes!

This Thursday, March 5th, Professor Kathy Cashman FRS of the University of Bristol will give the 4th annual John & Anne Phillips Lecture at the University of Hull. Professor Cashman’s talk will focus on “Mapping lava flows from the ground, air and space” and introduce the audience to her ground-breaking research into how volcanoes work. Maps of lava flow age,...

Media/Outreach/Research/Teaching

December 4, 2019

‘GEMS of North Yorkshire’ project launches in Scarborough

North Yorkshire’s rocks, fossils, and changing environments will be the stars of a newly formed science project based in Scarborough. ‘GEMS of North Yorkshire’ brings together the University of Hull’s Geology Hull and North Yorkshire Partnership Hub teams, and Scarborough-based education and outreach specialist, Hidden Horizons. The project will use school activities and public events to promote geological, environmental, and...

Media/Outreach/Teaching

November 19, 2019

The sedimentary environments of Hessle Foreshore

This page will be of interest solely to students of the University of Hull module 600260 Advanced Sedimentary Environments. If you are a student of said module, congratulations, you have found this webpage! As a reward, here is a link to the only publication I can find as a pdf on Google Scholar that mentions the terms ‘sediment’, ‘environment’ and...

Teaching

August 20, 2019

A brief history of Scarborough landslides

In the summer of 2018, I was filmed in Scarborough by a TV production company making a series for Channel 5 about Sinkholes. As the episode has never been broadcast, I can only assume my performance was so dreadful, or so controversial, that it cannot be permitted to see the light of day, but I thought I’d blog about it...

Media/Outreach/Teaching