Tag Archives: Jurassic

Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A little brachiopod gets a name (Middle Jurassic of southern Israel)

Moorellina negevensis Krawczyński & Wilson 2011; 1a – general view of the dorsal valve interior; 1b – oblique view showing brachial cavities and cardinalia. This week our fossil star is a new brachiopod species a Polish colleague (Cezary Krawczyński — … Continue reading

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Back to granite on Cima Dome

ZZYZX, CALIFORNIA–Our last stop of the rapidly-cooling day was on the huge Cima Dome east of Zzyzx in the Mojave National Preserve. The dome is so large (about 70 square miles) that it is impossible to detect when you are … Continue reading

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Wooster Geologists return to the Mojave Desert

ZZYZX, CALIFORNIA–All four geology faculty members, our administrative coordinator Patrice Reeder, Jesse Wiles and eight students have safely arrived at the Desert Studies Center in the delightful Zzyzx.  We spent a few hours exploring the Jurassic sandstones exposed in the … Continue reading

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A tiny sclerobiont community (Middle Jurassic of Poland)

This delightful little community is the subject of a current research project that developed from Independent Study fieldwork in 2006. Elyse Zavar (’07) and I traveled to southern Poland to work on Jurassic fossils associated with a carbonate hardground at … Continue reading

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: The ‘osses ‘ed clam (Upper Jurassic of southwestern England)

Katherine Nicholson Marenco (’03) and I did delightful fieldwork on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, England, during the summer of 2002. We collected fossils from the famous Portland Limestone (Upper Jurassic) in a series of working quarries. Katherine completed … Continue reading

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A brittle star trace fossil from the Jurassic of Utah

This week we have a trace fossil that looks almost exactly like the animal that made it. A trace fossil is evidence of organism activity recorded in the rock record. The photograph above shows one of my favorite specimens: Asteriacites … Continue reading

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The paleontology of hiatus concretions: fossils without sediment

Way back in 1984, when I was just a green Assistant Professor of Geology, my wife Gloria and I explored a series of Upper Ordovician (about 445 million years old) outcrops in northern Kentucky to plan a paleontology course field … Continue reading

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Trays of trilobites, buckets of belemnites ….

WOOSTER, OHIO — Last weekend we picked up another load of rocks, minerals and fossils donated by the family of one of our loyal alumni. We will be sorting through them for months getting them ready for displays and our … Continue reading

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New polychaete tubeworm fauna from the Jurassic of Israel

WOOSTER, OHIO–That may not be the most exciting title I could choose, but it was a fun project nonetheless. My Estonian colleague Olev Vinn and I have a paper in the latest issue of  Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie … Continue reading

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What we do during I.S. Meetings

I had an I.S. Meeting with Sam Spencer (’11) this morning. This is what we did: Sam is working on the geochemistry of a ~200 million year old diabase sheet that intruded into a rift basin in southeast Pennsylvania. When … Continue reading

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