GeologyRocks

The belief that dinosaurs underwent explosive species diversification just before they were wiped out is an illusion. A new study, published today, showed that the main evolutionary changes took place early in the dinosaur's history. The authors constructed a "supertree", which shows how species of dinosaurs evolved and carried out analysis on this to show when the major speciation events occurred.

The paper is published in Royal Proc. Soc. and the abstract and some more links are below:

A Precambrian impact as been 'discovered' in NW Scotland.

The Stac Fada Member of the Torridonian Stoer Group, previously believed to be a volcanic mudflow deposit has been reinterpreted as a fossilised ejecta blanket from a meteorite impact about 1.2 billion years ago.

Geology article abstract
http://www.gsajournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1130%2FG24454A.1

BBC News Story
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7314329.stm

Good page on previous interpretation with outcrop and thin section photos from Oxford Uni.
http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/~oesis/nws/nws-a98-st1.html#field

The World Digital Magnetic Map of the World has just been released by the Commission for the Geological Map of the World. The BBC News website has the story and a stunning downloadable pdf version.

A new, massive duck-billed dinosaur species has been discovered in Utah. Gryposaurus monumentensis (Gryposaurus “hook-beaked lizard”, monumentensis from Grand Staircase- Escalante National Monument where the fossils were found) from the Late Cretaceous had over 800 teeth.

More details at Utah Museum of Natural History

Geology gives a helping hand to archaeology again.

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070514/full/070514-2.html

"Historians need not be quite so impressed by Alexander the Great's defeat of the island of Tyre in 332BC. Geological studies of the region show that Alexander's army had help reaching the island, in the form of a natural land-bridge lying just a metre or two below the water's surface."

An attempt to describe 1.8 million species launched yesterday which will provide descriptions, images, videos and sounds of all the species online. Unlike wikispecies, this will be compiled by experts and, hopefully, will be of higher quality and consistancy. Rod Page, a taxonimist from the University of Glasgow, has already tried something like this called iSpecies (more detail on Rod's blog).

By way of space.com, researchers at University of Kansas suggest that the 64 million year cycle in biodiversity, including the Ordovician and Permian extinctions, is linked to the solar system's cyclic position with respect to the galactic plane.

Only 10 million years to the next one!

A story 2 years ago reported that a fossil T-Rex femur had been found with preserved soft tissue. Those tissues have now been analysed and protein extracted. Lo-and-behold, the protein is similar to that of chickens! This is further confirmation that birds are closely related to some dinosaur species.

"It has always been assumed that preservation of [dinosaur bones] does not extend to the cellular and molecular level," said co-author Mary Schweitzer, from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, US.

These are big crystals!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6518161.stm

In order to grow to this size, they must have been kept in a very narrow, stable temperature range.

The crystals are described fully in a Geology article (subscription required):
http://www.gsajournals.org/perlserv/?request=index-html&issn=0091-7613

The Silverpit crater in the North Sea has received a fair bit of media attention. Here's some more.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6503543.stm.