#fossil bed

[the-forest-library]

Theropod and Ankylosaurus Footprints - Mill Canyon, Utah

[kentuckianaphotography]

Falls of the Ohio Fossil Beds 🦴🦈

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

I lost my rock/fossil collection 🥺

[mineralsrocksandfossiltalks]

Wordplay Wednesday: Unconformities

Unconformity is a word used quite often by geologists. This is in reference to a contact between rocks that are unconformable or that were not deposited in sequence. There are several types of unconformities. Take the one above that I took at John Day Fossil Beds. The pale strata at the bottom of the hills are the fossil bearing John Day Formation from the Eocene/Oligocene (56-23.03 Ma). This is primarily welded tuff and tuffaceous siltstones. The dark strata above that is the Miocene Columbia River Basalts.

There is a distinct erosional surface between the two layers. This is called a disconformity. A disconformity is  an unconformity between parallel layers of sedimentary rocks which represents a period of erosion or non-deposition.

In the Wind River Gorge in Wyoming, there is another kind of unconformity called a nonconformity. A nonconformity occurs when sedimentary rocks are deposited on top of igneous or metamorphic rocks that have been eroded.  In the above photograph, Cambrian Flathead Sandstone was deposited on top of eroded Archean granite.

Perhaps you have heard of the Great Unconformity in the Grand Canyon? It's pretty famous even by non-geologists. It is the final kind of unconformity, the angular unconformity. An angular unconformity is a gap in the geologic record where tilted, eroded rock layers are overlain by younger, horizontal layers of sedimentary rock.

In review:

Tune in tomorrow for a look at the father of paleontology and make sure you remember today's terminology. It will be important for next Tuesday! Fossilize you later!

[echinoid-fossils-on-the-rocks]

The coral fragments gotten smaller now.

But the inner hyperfixiation of finding new corals now, is something bad and good both.

Like not just looking for flint echinoids, is an really good mood and welcome change to look & search for rocks and fossils.

But so small pieces, with hurting neck now. 😅

[captainmvf]

Love... Wins? Loses?

[higherhell]

Went into the woods earlier and took some pics of the scenery and selfies in which the beams of sunlight are directly frying my eyeballs

I also got bitten by mosquitoes multiple times despite not being out there long because I am a magnet for them. I am bearer of the curse and the curse is being delicious. I think last year I went outside for some time and came back in to find I'd received an average of two bites per minute I was out. With this power it's a wonder I ever have any blood at all.

[bettergeology]

Colorful Clays of the Painted Hills area

The Painted Hills are one of the most popular and well-known of Oregon's scenic treasures. The towering ridges of yellow, red, and black clays reveal part of the complex geologic story of Oregon when the area was a tropical rainforest, or a hardwood temperate forest, or a volcanic hellscape at different times. The different bands and layers are folded, warped, and faulted by complex plate tectonics. Here though, at Painted Cove just behind the main Painted Hills viewpoint, the story is just a little different.

Painted Cove is a couple of shallow gullies linked in a loop by a boardwalk and trail. In here, you pass through areas of bold red and yellow clays before reaching a gully flanked with a light purple rock. The light purple is of a completely different origin than the clays, which are effectively fossilized soil layers.

This is a weathered outcrop of rhyolite lava, a lava composition that is mostly quartz by mass. This area grades from purple to brown to red. This is an actual preserved soil horizon. If you dig a hole, you go through different soil horizons - or chemical and physical conditions - before you reach bedrock. Commonly these are O (for organic-rich), A, B, and C. B and C are closest to bedrock and include chunks of weathered, eroded source rock. Here, the purple is that C horizon, then the brown layer is B, and the red is an A horizon mantling the rhyolite lava flow. This whole stack of soil is somewhere around 25 million years old!

This is one of my favorite rock outcrops in all of Oregon because of how elegantly and simply it displays soil development processes from more than 25 million years ago!

(A note for other geologists: my soil horizon analogy isn't completely accurate since these paleosols have different classifications than regular young soils do, and I'm not very well-versed in those at all)

If you're in to photography, these are (with the exception of the 2nd to last shot) shot on Fuji Color 400 with my Nikon FM2.

[bigmammallama5]

Pretty pleased with what I pulled out of the train kiln, and kinda kicking myself for not putting some more functional ware in it! I've definitely got some wad grinding ahead of me but the reduction cooling at the end of the firing really added that last nice little umf. I'll share more images later once I've got everything cleaned up, I'm going to see what my soda pots look like on Monday and go from there!

[leidensygdom]

people be like "i love milfs" and the "milf" in question is a 23yo childless woman

[journey-and-destinationdotcom]

Petrified redwood stumps in Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument - Florissant, Colorado USA

© 1997 S. Flaherty

[mineralsrocksandfossiltalks]

Wordplay Wednesday: Conglomerate

What is a conglomerate? It is a type of sedimentary rock that is characterized by it's rounded gravel, pebble, or cobble-sized grains cemented together by silica, calcite, or iron oxide.

There are many ways in which a conglomerate can be formed. Turbidites are deep marine conglomerates created by turbidity currents.

Many are fluvial in nature and occur in rivers with a high flow rate (immature river systems) such as the Buckhorn Conglomerate of the Cedar Mountain Formation in Utah, USA.

Alluvial fans along mountain fronts tend to make the thickest conglomerates. These are often called fanglomerates.

Debris flows also deposit conglomerates such as the Clarno Formation in John Day National Monument which was deposited by a lahar or volcanic mudslide.

Glaciers create tillites, a very poorly sorted type of conglomerate (no discernable pattern to size or shape of grains).

[echinoid-fossils-on-the-rocks]

The first pics of an piece of coral & an part of belemnite fossils, found now on the sun setting.

Edit: Found also an handful of snails & mussels in sandstone pieces with the gravel on sand.

[malorisaurus]

The day before yesterday, I drove to SE Idaho to go to some fossil beds and to see displays of fossils from the area (as well as some from nearby states because this was all one large wetlands region before concepts like states existed). I will post more about this stuff later.

The other part of this trip was to test out camping in my car to see if traveling around by myself and sleeping in relative comfort was possible for me.

Here is my bed setup! In the front passenger's seat is all of my food storage, including an electric cooler that is acting as my refrigerator. The floor behind the driver's seat is my "closet" (where I am storing my towel, toiletries, and duffel bag lol) and is accessible from inside the car in bed mode. Everything stashes away nicely. I even have solar panels and my Bluetti battery in there, three gallons of water (plus my 2L hydration bottle and 32oz hydroflask). A 1.5" memory foam pad serves as the matress, and there are blackout shades that fit perfectly into the windows for privacy, though I hadn't put them up for this photograph. It has turned out to be rather cozy.

Since childhood, I've really loved making small, enclosed spaces that I could crawl into and feel cocooned. My car feels like I made the best little blanket fort, which is kind of wild to me. I could probably enjoy staying like this—as long as I had access to a bathroom and shower—for quite a while!

Prioritizing lots of pillows (including an armchair pillow thing) was the way to go. I have reclined in my pod and read, edited, and watched movies before sleeping each night. It feels like being a little rolly poly, and the car is my exoskeleton. Or I am a turtle, and the inside of my shell is AWEOME. A cave bear with a SICK den. Even when I go back home, I might set it up sometimes just to have a fort.

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Palaeontologist Mary Anning (1799-1847) was known around the world for her Jurassic discoveries in the fossil beds at Lyme Regis. Her findings changed scientific thinking about prehistoric life yet she was not able to join the Geological Society of London. In her lifetime, her extraordinary finds were rarely published or credited to her, and she was paid little money for them. This portrait of Mary Anne her dog Tray, by Benjamin Donne, a neighbour, is a copy of an 1842 painting.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

[dotcien]

If you see me thinking about a 77 y/o geezer all day, mind your own business fr