Rocks-everywhere - Science, Plants, Cats, Music, And More

palaeoart

Finally got my new air compressor hooked up and we’re back in business on the fossil prep front. First up in the queue was the removal of the excess matrix and cleaning up on this Peronoceras subarmatum which I found on the Jurassic Yorkshire Coast a few months ago. I’ve been out of action on fossil prep for nearly 4 months so it’s nice to be back up and running

A columnar basalt staircase from Iceland (was actually not that easy to climb)

Heidi Gustafson, who has spent the past five years collecting and working with ocher, walks along Whidbey Island’s Double Bluff Beach, off the coast of Washington, in search of the material. She came to scout this area, where she spent time as a child, after recalling its interesting cliff exposure.Some ochers, Gustafson believes, are calling out to be turned into a pigment. Others are more resistant. Those ocher fragments are either returned to their point of origin, or, if Gustafson cannot get back there, placed outside in a stone graveyard of sorts that she has created in the forest near her cabin. A few of her ocher-based artworks hang on the wall.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/t-magazine/ocher-heidi-gustafson.html

supermassive black hole

A Highland Coo and her calf wandering down an empty road, Argyll and the Isles, Scotland. Credit: Andy Maclachlan.

As cat owners we like to joke about how the cat is the one who’s really in charge, but let’s be honest here: my cats think they’re in charge, but they’re also fucking dumbasses. It’s sort of an incompetent-king-and-long-suffering-advisor arrangement, if the king were prone to getting their head stuck in Kleenex boxes.

the fact that we can map sedimentary units from space is really cool and also Mars is cool!

every morning when i go in the kitchen she yells at me nonstop so i have to put the spoon on her head

Peering back in time over 420 million years ago into the Silurian Period when the first land plants emerged. Pictured in the foreground are Baragwanathia and Zosterophyllum with their pinkish coloured sporangia for dispersing spores. More to come soon from this project with biologist and fellow fossil plant enthusiast Ken Kwak.