limestone

Book review – The Greywacke: How a Priest, a Soldier and a Schoolteacher Uncovered 300 Million Years of History

7-minute read
keywords: geology, history of science

Take a look at the geological time scale[1]. Thanks to the dinosaurs, we have all heard of the Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Triassic. However, going back in time from the Triassic, the Phanerozoic Eon in which we live today stretches another 289 million years into the past; from the Permian that ended ~252 million years ago, through the Carboniferous, Devonian, Silurian, Ordovician, to the Cambrian that started ~539 million years ago. In The Greywacke, avocational geologist Nick Davidson tells the story of how those geological periods got their names and transports the reader back to the heydays of Victorian geology when three men would make Britain’s rocks the centre of international attention. In so doing, he unlocks for a general audience an episode in the history of geology that was so far consigned to more technical literature.

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Book review – Marvelous Microfossils: Creators, Timekeepers, Architects

5-minute read

Say fossils and what comes to mind are the big, the bad, and the sexy: dinosaurs, pterosaurs, marine reptiles—in short, macrofossils. But perhaps more important and certainly more numerous are the microfossils. Fossils so small that you need a microscope to see them. In this richly illustrated book, French geologist and micropalaeontologist Patrick De Wever offers bite-sized insights into a discipline that rarely gets mainstream attention but undergirds many human endeavours.

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Book review – Oceans of Kansas: A Natural History of the Western Interior Sea (Second Edition)

8-minute read

The deep past harbours many events, epochs, and places that are still a mystery to me. Case in point: once upon a time, North America was cut in half by an enormous ocean. Something I was only dimly aware of. Luckily, Indiana University Press’s flagship palaeontology series Life of the Past has just the book to remedy that. I may be three years late to the party, but this 2017 book provides all the details one could ask for, and then some.

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