You are browsing the archive for plants Archives - Page 5 of 5 - Mountain Beltway.
7 June 2010
A day in the field
I spent last Thursday on a long field trip in the Valley and Ridge province of northernwestern Virginia. Leading the trip was Dan Doctor of the USGS-Reston. Accompanying Dan was a UVA environmental science student named Nathan. And the NOVA crew rounded it out: professor Ken Rasmussen from the Annandale campus, associate professor Victor Zabielski from the Alexandria campus, and me. We met at the Survey at 9am, and headed …
14 May 2010
Gorgeous poison ivy
Spent the day in the field yesterday with Liz Johnson of James Madison University and her fun group of students in a “Geology of Skyline Drive” summer course. More on the geology later… For now, I just wanted to toss a group of photos of poison ivy up here. Look at this beautiful plant! Look, but don’t touch!
9 May 2010
Bouquet
In honor of Mother’s Day, I offer up an unusual bouquet of flowers… These are not really flowers, of course, but an odd form of lichen that I found in the Crazy Mountains of Montana last summer, growing on a spruce tree. Freaky little things, eh? All shots are with the macro function on: the black circles measure about 0.5cm across. Happy Mother’s Day!
6 March 2010
The Ghosts of Evolution, by Connie Barlow
Over Snowmageddon, I read Connie Barlow’s book The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms. [Google Books; Amazon] Barlow isn’t a scientist, but she’s got a scientist in her pocket: Paul Martin of the University of Arizona. In 1982, Martin and Dan Janzen of the University of Pennsylvania published a paper in Science in which they postulated that a lot of the features of some modern …
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.