Category Archives: Uncategorized

Wooster Geologist at Fort Ligonier, Pennsylvania: Choosing your ground geologically

This afternoon, the first day of Fall Break at The College of Wooster, my family began a weekend excursion to southern Pennsylvania — our first vacation since the pandemic. We first visited one of my favorite reconstructed frontier outposts: Fort … Continue reading

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A lovely day to visit the Ordovician seas of Indiana

This year’s Paleoecology class field trip was to a familiar place: a roadcut outside Richmond, Indiana, exposing the Whitewater Formation in the gorgeous Upper Ordovician System. We call it the catchy name “C/W-148” (N 39.78722°, W 84.90166°). It was a … Continue reading

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Alaska Collaboration, Ongoing and Future Projects

In addition to the summer work described by Lilly Hinkley and Tyrell Cooper, the Wooster Tree Ring Lab is collaborating projects with (1) The Tree Ring Lab of the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany. This work is part of a … Continue reading

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Coring Trees and Flying over Seas, Hoonah, Alaska 2023

Guest Bloggers: Lilly Hinkley and Tyrell Cooper Tyrell, Lilly, Nick and Dr. Wiles of Wooster’s Tree Ring Lab (WTRL) were in Juneau and Hoonah, Alaska working in collaboration with the Alaskan Youth Stewards (AYS) in order to extend our tree … Continue reading

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Aquatic siliceous microbiota team excelling with summer research at The College of Wooster

I am honored to be working with a great research team this summer in Scovel Hall at The College of Wooster. Our topic has been the analysis of the siliceous sponges and diatoms in a sediment core from Brown’s Lake … Continue reading

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Another new paper: A nestling brachiopod in an Ordovician boring and its implications

I know, I know, several new papers lately. This spike in publications is a function of two things: The pandemic with its enforced isolation meant my colleagues and I had more time to finish manuscripts, and I belong to some … Continue reading

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The Ordovician Bioclaustration Revolution: A new paper

Bioclaustration is the process by which an organism is embedded within the growing skeleton of another. Bioclaustrations are fascinating in the fossil record because they give direct information about how two or more organisms lived together in the ancient past … Continue reading

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A new paper on brachiopod symbiosis in the Early Paleozoic

My Estonian colleague and friend Olev Vinn and I have been working for many years on examples of parasitism recorded in the fossil record. For the last couple of years we have been summarizing the data and assessing paleoecological and … Continue reading

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Consequences of publishing fraud: A geosciences journal placed on probation

In the Fall of 2021, in the depths of the covid pandemic, I found a long series of fake papers in the Springer Nature Arabian Journal of Geosciences. These were blatant frauds, with nonsense titles, nonsense references, and nonsense text … Continue reading

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An Analysis of the Effects of Water Chemistry on Diatom Ecology Over Time in the American Upper Midwest — The Independent Study project of Richard Torres (’23)

Editor’s Note: Independent Study (IS) at The College of Wooster is a three-course series required of every student before graduation. Earth Sciences students typically begin in the second semester of their junior years with project identification, literature review, and a … Continue reading

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