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27 November 2012
Good lighting on invertebrate fossils
Good lighting on these fossils at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, eh? You’ve got a batch of brachiopods mixed with crinoid columnals and little cornucopia-shaped rugose corals. Maybe some sponge spicules in there, too… This is a great rock because (a) it’s full of well-preserved fossils in a fine-grained matrix, and (b) it’s been weathered so that the fossils poke out in high relief. But the way the …
20 September 2012
Pachycephalosaurs were boneheads
This is a display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta: It shows the domed skull of a pachycephalosaur: And it shows a virtual cross-section through that skull, revealing the size of the brain it protects: Weird animal. Great museum display: it says it all!
24 June 2011
Friday fold
A boulder outside the door of the Geological Museum in Laramie, Wyoming. Purty, parasitic, passive folds… Happy Friday. My field course starts tomorrow here in Bozeman. I’ll soon have a lot less time for blogging. Brace yourself.
22 May 2011
New hallway display: geologic provinces of northern Virginia
Callan shows off a new hallway display in his building at Northern Virginia Community College, showcasing the numerous geologic provinces of northern Virginia (as well as adjacent mid-Atlantic states).
3 December 2010
Friday fold: gneiss one!
One other thing that I noticed during my visit last weekend to the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville, Virginia, was this fold. As soon as I saw it, I squealed “Oooh! That’s going to be the Friday fold!” It says something about the crowd I was traveling with that everyone (a) knew what I was talking about and (b) knew before I did that I would photograph this …
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.
11 November 2010
Microfaults-a-million
I got to Pittsburgh around 1:30pm yesterday, which meant I had several free hours before the opening reception for new Fine Fellows. I took a bunch of photos of the exhibits there, but my traveling laptop doesn’t have the image processing software that I usually employ to resize these things, so for now I’ll just share this one. It’s a sandstone from South Dakota, age unknown, which shows beautiful parallel …
10 November 2010
Gigapanning 101
I’m off today to the first ever Fine International Conference on Gigapixel Imaging for Science, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania over the next several days. There, as one of this year’s cadre of Fine fellows, I’ll be given a Gigapan camera robot and photo-stitching software, and they will train me how to use it. I’m looking forward to producing my own Gigapan images, which will doubtless be primarily geological in scope, …
3 April 2010
Diatom time
Today’s EPOD is of a diatom. Seems like as good an excuse as any to share a couple photos of a big brass diatom sculpture from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Finger for scale, but not really, since the sculpture isn’t to scale.
11 March 2010
Folds of New York
Thursday is ‘fold day’ here at Mountain Beltway. Let’s take a look at some folds I saw last weekend in New York City. We’ll start with a bunch seen in the Manhattan Schist in Central Park. Here’s an example of the foliation in the schist. It’s got finer-grained regions and coarser, schistier regions with big honking muscovite flakes. Metamorphic petrologists: Does this correspond to paleo-bedding? (i.e. quartz-rich regions that metamorphose …
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.