Tag Archives: fossils

Wooster Paleontologists in Indiana!

mwilson September 12, 2010 7:46 pm

RICHMOND and LIBERTY, INDIANA–The College of Wooster Invertebrate Paleontology class had its field trip today to sunny eastern Indiana. We collected bags and bags of fossils from Upper Ordovician strata for research projects throughout the rest of the course. Each … Continue reading →

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Hederelloids: Pulled from obscurity! (Well, maybe …)

mwilson September 11, 2010 4:23 pm

PARMA, OHIO–This afternoon I gave a talk at a meeting of the North Coast Fossil Club in this suburb of Cleveland. I chose the poorly-known fossil group called hederelloids as my topic because I knew that many people in that … Continue reading →

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Last stop in Europe: The Senckenberg Museum of Natural History

mwilson August 18, 2010 1:33 pm

FRANKFURT, GERMANY–Isn’t that a great front yard for a Natural History Museum? Diplodocus longus strides by columnar basalt and a massive chunk of conglomerate. This is the Naturmuseum Senckenberg in downtown Frankfurt, about two blocks from my hotel. On my … Continue reading →

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Fossils on the Meuse-Argonne Battlefield

mwilson August 16, 2010 10:21 am

VIENNE LE CHATEAU, FRANCE–To my delight, while exploring the Meuse-Argonne area this morning, I found an exposure of marly Cretaceous sediments very near where my Grandfather’s tank brigade assembled for an attack at dawn on October 4, 1918. The sediment … Continue reading →

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The Messel Fossil Pit: A world-class experience

mwilson August 13, 2010 11:23 pm

FRANKFURT, GERMANY–Last year at this time I had the privilege of visiting the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale on an expedition led by my friend Matthew James of Sonoma State University in California. It was an extraordinary opportunity to visit one … Continue reading →

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Geology and religion: le Grand Animal de Maastricht

mwilson August 10, 2010 3:25 pm

MAASTRICHT, THE NETHERLANDS–Next month I am giving a talk on campus about evolution in a lecture series on “science and religion”. I was particularly intrigued, then, to hear a story about the famous mosasaur discovered in the Maastricht tunnels that … Continue reading →

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The best Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary yet

mwilson August 10, 2010 1:30 am

MAASTRICHT, THE NETHERLANDS–The Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (K/T, or as I should be writing, the “Cretaceous-Paleogene” boundary, or K/Pg) has been one of the Wooster Geology themes this summer. We saw it in Alabama and Mississippi in May, and in Israel in … Continue reading →

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Wooster Geologist in The Netherlands

mwilson August 8, 2010 4:37 pm

MAASTRICHT, THE NETHERLANDS–This is the first day of the International Bryozoology Association post-conference field trip. We took a train south from Kiel to Hamburg, Germany, and then connected with another train to Cologne. After spending a half-hour at the Cologne … Continue reading →

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The power of biostratigraphy: the Campanian-Maastrichtian boundary in the Late Cretaceous

mwilson August 7, 2010 12:10 pm

KIEL, GERMANY–Comparing the two very different geological sections pictured above, you should ask how we know that they are precisely the same age. After all, they are thousands of miles apart and are quite different in their composition and fossil … Continue reading →

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Cretaceous soft-bodied bryozoans from the western USA

mwilson August 6, 2010 2:30 pm

KIEL, GERMANY–I gave my presentation to the International Bryozoology Association meeting this afternoon. It was a fun project because it involved two of my favorite things: working with Paul Taylor from the Natural History Museum and advising an Independent Study … Continue reading →

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