Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois - ESCONI

Gas Line Uncovers Artifacts

Via Speigel Online:

...While environmentalists are sharply opposed to the construction of the new Baltic Sea pipeline, archaeologists are delighted. The massive Nord Stream project to bring natural gas from Russia to Germany has uncovered dozens of shipwrecks and other historic artifacts...

Brain Surgury 4,000 Years Ago

Via Archaeology News:

...The examination of a skeleton found during archaeological digs at Kultepe Hoyuk near the Kayseri Sivas highway suggests that the Assyrian tradesman's skull was opened 4,000 years ago to drain the cerebral cortex...

World's Oldest Organisms

From CNN via Geology.com:

Rachel Sussman is a time traveler. For the last few years, the American photographer has journeyed across the globe on a mission to bring back images of the world's oldest living organisms...

Ice Melt and Uplift

Via Geology News:

The ice on Greenland is melting so fast that the land in some areas uplifts at a rate of over 1″ per year. By 2025 it could be uplifting at twice that rate!

Obituary for Harry Whittington

Via Telegraph:

Professor Harry Whittington, who died on June 20 aged 94, was the former Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge and the world’s leading authority on fossil trilobites; in later life he led painstaking research which revealed a “Cambrian explosion” and raised disturbing questions about the processes of evolution....

Primate Split

Via Science News:

... Discoverers of a partial apelike skull in western Saudi Arabia say that it now appears that a poorly understood parting of major primate groups occurred between 29 million and 24 million years ago. A 2004 analysis of DNA from living apes and monkeys in Africa and Asia had estimated an earlier divergence, between 34.5 and 29.2 million years ago...

Ohio's Stonehenge

Via National Geographic:

... Among their latest finds: Like Stonehenge, the Ohio timber circles were likely used to mark astronomical events such as the summer solstice...

A New Henge at Stonehenge

Via Christian Science Monitor:

... The find, discovered 3,000 feet away from the ancient stone structures, is nothing less than a whole new henge – that is, a circular ditch enclosing a ring which could possibly be the remains of another – but this time wooden – monument. The new henge is being dubbed "Timberhenge" or Stonehenge’s “lost twin."...

Digging Dinosaurs

Via Discovery News:

...Rare evidence has been found of dinosaurs preying on mammals. Fossilized mammal burrows that appear to have been clawed out by a predator suggests that some theropod dinosaurs dug into mammal dens to get furry morsels...

Mississippi River Caused 1811 Earthquake

From MSNBC via Geology News:

... Massive earthquakes that struck the town of New Madrid, Mo., in 1811 can be traced to the actions of the mighty Mississippi River thousands of years earlier, a new study in the journal Nature suggests..

Triceratops Rethought

Via New Scientist:

... Now Scannella and Horner say that triceratops is merely the juvenile form of torosaurus. As the animal aged, its horns changed shape and orientation and its frill became longer, thinner and less jagged..

Oldest Tracks

Via Science Daily:

... The 318-million-year-old reptile footprints were found in sea-cliffs on the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, Canada. They show that reptiles were the first vertebrates (animals with a backbone) to conquer dry continental interiors...

Retrovirus 'Fossils'

Via Science Daily:

Over millions of years, retroviruses, which insert their genetic material into the host genome as part of their replication, have left behind bits of their genetic material in vertebrate genomes. In a recent study, published July 29 in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens, a team of researchers have now found that human and other vertebrate genomes also contain many ancient sequences from Ebola/Marburgviruses and Bornaviruses -- two deadly virus families...

Google Directory of Paleontologists

Don't know much about this, but found it interesting...

Google Directory - Paleontologists.

Photos Added

New photos taken by Joe Kubal of the Juniors Field Trip to Devil's Cave in North Aurora IL.

Tiny Origins of Oil

From the NYTImes:

...Today, a principal tenet of geology is that a vast majority of the world’s oil arose not from lumbering beasts on land but tiny organisms at sea. It holds that blizzards of microscopic life fell into the sunless depths over the ages, producing thick sediments that the planet’s inner heat eventually cooked into oil. It is estimated that 95 percent or more of global oil traces its genesis to the sea...