Dr. Meagen Pollock, our esteemed petrologist, is our guest speaker today. She would like us to visit the Mojave National Preserve Geology Field Trip website and read the pages on Cima Dome, Hole-in-the-Wall, Cinder Cones, and the Granite Mountains. (Lovely places, all.) We will take the virtual field trip in class and view some representative rock samples from our collection. Petrologists are warned that Dr. Pollock expects you to be able to identify and describe the rocks!
(Remember that you can click on the Mojave Desert tag of our Wooster Geologists blog to see lots of photos and stories from our previous field trips in this area.)
Geology in the News –
Remember the hypothesis of the Moon’s origin that involves a planet-sized body crashing into the early Earth? I just learned that planet has a name: Theia. Now isotopic evidence is telling us more about Theia, including that it had a composition similar to Earth, but not quite the same.
An extensive survey of the fossil record (and living organisms) shows conclusively that evolution favored larger animals in the sea. “In the past 542 million years, the average size of a marine animal has gone up by a factor of 150.” That’s cool. Bigger is almost always better in the ocean, and changing environmental conditions may have played a role.
More often than you think we find specimens squirreled away in museums that someone forgot to properly identify, and they turn out years later upon rediscovery to be new to science. The latest case is a fantastically-preserved ichthyosaur from the Jurassic of England. Museum collections are absolutely critical to our continuing enterprise of describing life’s diversity.