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20 August 2012
Morning with the local expert
Royal Tyrrell Museum geologist Dave Eberth donates time and expertise to help Callan’s students understand the Cretaceous-aged Horseshoe Canyon Formation in central Alberta.
8 August 2012
Armored mud balls
Ever seen an armored mud ball? In this post, Callan encounters a small herd of these geological oddities in a coulee in southern Alberta.
5 October 2011
Two Sisters
All this talk about footprints and tail traces, and I haven’t even shown you any “for sure” dinosaur fossils. Well, let’s remedy that today. We return now to the scene: exposures of the Jurassic Morrison Formation, on the east side of the Bighorn Basin, just north of Shell, Wyoming. I was wandering around, finding things like ripples and lichens and cobbles of chert that had multiple intersecting conchoidal fractures, and …
4 October 2011
Tall tail
Okay, so I was out photographing ripples and admiring lichens, and then I saw this: That’s a rippled slab of sandstone, but with a linear groove that obliquely cross-cuts the ripple marks. Smaller, parallel grooves lie within the main groove. Here’s another look at that same one, spun around and zoomed-in: It looks as if something was dragged through the wet sand at this location, prior to its lithification. Given …
6 September 2011
Callan gets friendly with dinosaur
At the Sheridan College natural history museum, this past summer.
27 June 2011
Team Rockies 2011
Our field class visited the Museum of the Rockies yesterday. Here’s the full team!
25 June 2011
A major discovery
Visiting Butch Dooley and crew on a dinosaur dig in the Jurassic Morrison Formation on Wednesday morning, I did a lot of wandering around the area, dubbed the Two Sisters site. I noticed something in the sandstone at the top of one hillock, and thought it looked like a sauropod footprint: (The depression is filled in with modern mud.) I took a photo, and thought, I need to ask Butch …
30 November 2010
Scenes from the Virginia Museum of Natural History
The author describes a quick visit to the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville, Virginia, on his way back to DC from Thanksgiving travel. Highlights: a dinosaur, a giant stromatolite, encrusting crinoids (they do that?) and a giant ground sloth.
Callan Bentley is Associate Professor of Geology at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. For his work on this blog, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers recognized him with the James Shea Award. He has also won the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia, and the Biggs Award for Excellence in Geoscience Teaching from the Geoscience Education Division of the Geological Society of America. In previous years, Callan served as a contributing editor at EARTH magazine, President of the Geological Society of Washington and President the Geo2YC division of NAGT.