During the Industrial Revolution not only did the emission of greenhouse gases by burning fossil fuels start to increase exponentially, but so too did the movement of rock and sediment to get at th…| Earth-logs
Regular readers of Earth-logs will recall that the islands of Indonesia were reached by the archaic humans Homo erectus and H. floresiensis at least a million years ago. Anatomical comparison of th…| Earth-logs
In 1933 labourers unearthed a very large skull during the construction of a bridge near Harbin, Northern China. At that time, the area was under occupation by Imperial Japanese forces. To keep it o…| Earth-logs
Who the Denisovans were is almost completely bound up with their DNA. Until 2019 their only tangible remains were from a single Siberian cave and amounted to a finger bone, a toe bone three molars …| Earth-logs
Annual log contents – click on year to download PDF 2000 Quality of the fossil record; biological recovery from mass extinctions; fossil moths; end-Triassic extinction; giant fossil duck; en…| Earth-logs
This post’s title seems beyond belief for an event that occurred 66 million years ago: how can geologists possibly say that with any conviction? The claim is based on fossil fishes found in the Lat…| Earth-logs
About 200 Ma ago, the break-up of the Pangaea supercontinent was imminent. The signs of impending events are spread through the eastern seaboard of North America, West Africa and central and northe…| Earth-logs
For British geologists of my generation the Triassic didn’t raise our spirits to any great extent. There’s quite a lot of it on the British Geological Survey 10-miles-to-the-inch geological map (So…| Earth-logs
Meteor Crater, 60 km east of Flagstaff in Arizona, USA, is probably the most visited site of an impact by an extraterrestrial object. At 1.3 km across it isn’t especially big, but it is exceptionally… More| Earth-logs
The colours of human skin, eyes and hair in living people across the world are determined by variants of genes (alleles) found at the same place on a chromosome. Since chromosomes are inherited from both… More| Earth-logs
Triassic reef limestones in the Dolomites of northern Italy. Credit: © Matteo Volpone Four out of six mass extinctions that ravaged life on Earth during the last 300 Ma coincided with large igneous…| Earth-logs
In Earth-logs you may have come across the uses of oxygen isotopes, mainly in connection with their variations in the fossils of marine organisms and in ice cores. The relative proportion of the ‘h…| Earth-logs
The earliest incontrovertible signs of life on Earth are in the 3.48 billion-year-old Dresser Formation in the Pilbara craton of Western Australia, which take the form of carbon-coated, bubble-like…| Earth-logs
Simplified geological map of the Archaean Yilgarn Craton in Western Australia. Credit: Geological Survey of Western Australia Every ancient craton seen from space shows patterns that are unique to …| Earth-logs
Since 1999, the rocks generally acknowledged to be the oldest on Earth were part of the Acasta gneisses in the Slave Craton in Canada’s Northwest Territories; specifically the Idiwhaa tonalitic gneisses. Zircons extracted from that… More| Earth-logs
For over a century Chinese scientists have been puzzling over ancient human skulls that show pronounced brow ridges. Some assigned them to Homo, others to species that they believe were unique to C…| Earth-logs
For life on Earth, one of the most fundamental shifts in ecosystems was the Great Oxygenation Event 2.5 to 2.3 billion years (Ga) ago. The first evidence for its occurrence was from the sedimentary record,… More| Earth-logs
The molecules that make up all living matter are almost entirely (~98 %) made from the elements Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen and Phosphorus (CHONP) in order of their biological importance. Al…| Earth-logs
During the Middle Palaeolithic (250 to 30 ka) anatomically modern humans (AMH) and Neanderthals were engaged in new technological developments in Europe and Africa as well as in migration and socia…| Earth-logs
