In recent months, I had the opportunity to work on a project analysing subsurface data from a rock sequence previously interpreted as the product of an estuarine depositional environment. The client sought subsurface maps to characterize the spatial distribution of various geobodies associated with sedimentary deposits typically found in modern estuaries. In other words, the goal was to reconstruc ...[Read More]
Introduction Bird footprints are some of the most recognizable traces in the fossil record. Yet birds exhibit a wide variety of behaviours which may be preserved as ancient traces. Records include feeding traces like probing, nesting structures and possibly coprolites, but the study of the traces left by modern birds extends their scope to courtship-related scrapes, swimming and diving traces, bir ...[Read More]
International Scientific Continental Drilling Program (ICDP) campaigns may lead scientists from all over the world to most exciting places that are often of extraordinary beauty and remoteness. All these attributes certainly apply to Lake Nam Co situated at an altitude of 4700 m above sea level on the Tibetan Plateau in the Himalayas. Today this area supplies one third of the humankind with fresh ...[Read More]
While working on the exceptional, but remote outcrops of Baja California, I have encountered an extraordinary quantity of fossilized tree fragments in Cretaceous deposits. These fossils were preserved in both subaerial, fluvial, and marine environments. Does this mean that preservation of tree trunks is easy? How can wood be preserved for more than 70 million years? What kind of information can we ...[Read More]