The 2025 Mazon Creek Fossil Day will be held on October 11th, 2025 at the Coal City Library from 10 AM to 3 PM. See you there! Previous events October 16th, 2023 October 21st, 2024

This is Mazon Monday post #290.  What’s your favorite Mazon Creek fossil?  Tell us at email:[email protected]. There was lots of fun on the field trip to the Danville Spoil Pile on Saturday, September 27th, 2025. The day was hot and dry with a clear sky and temperatures in the 80s... summer like weather in late September is always nice!

An artist’s reconstruction Zavacephale in a Cretaceous landscape.Credit...Masato Hattori The New York Times has a fascinating look at beautiful pachycephalosaur specimen from Mongolia. The animal was recently described in a paper in the journal Nature. Zavacephale rinpoche was found in the Gobi Desert by Tsogtbaatar Chinzorig, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University. The name means “root” and “jewel” in Tibetan, which is a reference to the fossil's age, 115 to 108 million years old, about 14 million years earlier than scientists had thought these dinosaurs first evolved their helmet-like heads.

The ancestors of giant birds like common rheas were likely able to fly long distances, fossils suggest. (Image credit: Mickael Nigay / 500px via Getty Images) LiveScience has a story that looks a paper about flightless birds and how they may have dispersed across multiple continents. The paper "Quantitative analysis of stem-palaeognath flight capabilities sheds light on ratite dispersal and flight loss" was published in the journal…

This is the “Fossil Friday” post #285.  Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website.  We will post any fossil pictures you send in to [email protected].  Please include a short description or story.  Check the #FossilFriday Bluesky/Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world! We have a beautiful Palaeoxyris lewisi shark egg case from Mazon Creek for this week's Fossil Friday.

This is Throwback Thursday #285. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to [email protected]. Thanks! email:[email protected]. Purple quartz, more commonly known as amethyst from Bancroft, Ontario, Canada. 25 Years Ago – October 2000 The ESCONI Flea Market was held on October 7th, 2000.

Dinosaur diggers work by lantern light at Triceratops Gulch near Glenrock. To maximize the on-site, down-and-dirty experience for participants, summer excavations extend into the evening, so the search for turtle shell, Triceratops ribs, and T.rex teeth can continue. (Andrew Rossi, Cowboy State Daily) Want to dig for dinosaurs? Well... there a place near Glenrock, Wyoming that might be perfect for a vacation next year!

Field trips require membership, but visitors are welcome at all meetings! Sat, Oct 4th Mineralogy Meeting - 7:30 at the College of DuPage Technical Education Center (TEC) Building – Room 1038B (Map) – “Calcite” Fri, Oct 10th General Meeting – 8 PM – via Zoom (TBA). Foreman Bandama of the Field Museum will be presenting “Great Zimbabwe among its peers: Exploring the height of ancient civilizations in southern Africa.”

The ESCONI Mineral Study Group will meet on Saturday October 4, 2025 at 7:30 PM in TEC 1038B at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn. See Directions and Map below. The program will be on "Calcite", presented by Mike Litt and Dave Carlson. Calcite has the largest variety of forms of any mineral, and may be the most-collected mineral in the world.

This is Mazon Monday post #289. What’s your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:[email protected]. More exciting Mazon Creek research is out. This is a short paper in the journal Vertebrate Anatomy Morphology Palaeontology (VAMP), which details the first occurrence of the urocordylid Ctenerpeton remex in the Mazon Creek fossil deposit! Arjan Mann, a curator of early fossil vertebrates at the Field Museum of Natural History, instigated the research when he found detailed notes and a partial description by John Bolt, his predecessor.

Deep-Earth diamond.  Yael Kempe and Yakov Weiss Scientific American has a story about the formation of diamonds. Inclusions are imperfections in gem stones. They are tiny bits of the surrounding rock when the gem or crystal forms. Inclusions in two diamond samples from South Africa are shedding light on how diamonds form deep in Earth's mantle. The two new diamond samples each contain inclusions of carbonate minerals that are rich in oxygen atoms (a state known as oxidized) and oxygen-poor nickel alloys (a state known as reduced, in the parlance of chemistry).

PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the "Age of Sharks" or should it be the "Age of Weird Sharks". Long before the rise of the great whites and hammerheads we know today, sharks and their cartilaginous relatives ruled Earth’s oceans and rivers in astonishing variety. It was the golden age of sharks. But why did sharks get so incredibly diverse and odd during this period, only to lose most of that diversity forever? Also, special thanks to Joschua Knüppe for providing those gorgeous faunal overviews of the Bear Gulch and Cleveland Shale formations!

This is the “Fossil Friday” post #285. Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website. We will post any fossil pictures you send in to [email protected]. Please include a short description or story. Check the #FossilFriday Bluesky/Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world! We have a very special specimen of Alethopteris lonchitica for this weeks "Fossil Friday".

This is Throwback Thursday #284. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to [email protected]. Thanks! email:[email protected]. If you follow our Throwback Thursday "Looking Back At ESCONI" posts, you may have noticed the entry mentioning Isabel Bassett Wasson in the…

Researchers armed with CRISPR looked to the embryos of zebrafish to understand the genetic changes that led to the evolution of hands and feet. Credit...Pablo Bou Mira/Alamy Carl Zimmer has an interesting post about the evolution of hands. It appears it all started about 360 million years ago... Now the precise DNA-editing technology known as CRISPR is letting scientists reconstruct this ancient evolutionary change in molecular detail.

There were some very interesting things on display at the September 2025 Paleontology Meeting. The theme of the night was "Show and Tell". We had over 20 attendees with everything from Mazon Creek to crinoids to nautiloids to a large model of a Velociraptor. John Catalani, Paleontology Study Group chairman, gave us a preview of his October presentation on…

This is Mazon Monday post #288.  What’s your favorite Mazon Creek fossil?  Tell us at email:[email protected]. Callipteridium neuropteroides is one of the rarer seed ferns (Pteridospermatophyta) found in the Mazon Creek fossil deposit. Although, it is much more common in the Herrin Coal flora, if the Danville locality is truly representative of that deposit. Callipteridium jongmansi is a European species that appears to be identical.

PBS NOVA has a new 5 part series running on their website and Youtube. The first episode is called "Human Origins". Check it out! Trace the remarkable origin story of Homo sapiens and the crucial moments that shaped our species. Official website: | #novapbs Where do we come from? To find out, journey back to a time when multiple human species walked the earth.

For the newcomers, the first meeting back from summer vacation has traditionally been called "Brag Night" or "Show and Tell". Well... The ESCONI September 2025 Paleontology Meeting will be held on 2025-09-20 at 7:30 PM at the College of DuPage Technical Education Center (TEC) Building – Room 1038B (Map). The topic of the meeting is "Show and Tell". So, bring out your fossils, but especially bring in some cephalopods!

This is the “Fossil Friday” post #283.  Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website.  We will post any fossil pictures you send in to [email protected].  Please include a short description or story.  Check the #FossilFriday Bluesky/Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world! We have a nice predatory polychaete worm from Mazon Creek for this week's Fossil Friday.

This is Throwback Thursday #283. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to [email protected]. Thanks! email:[email protected]. The following poem appeared in the September 1964 edition of the ESCONI newsletter. It was written by Gene Falada, who was inspired by a field trip to the spoil piles near South Wilmington, IL on August 8th, 1964.

Yellow Hammer News has a story about an unexpected catch on a family fishing trip in Alabama. They found a 32 million year old (Oligocene) turtle in the bank of the river. It turns out the animal was not known to science and has now been named for their family, Coleman... Ueloca colemanorum. The animal's description was published in the journal…

Christian Kammerer is the Research Curator of Paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and he spent last week digging around eastern North Carolina to gather prehistoric fossils for the museum’s collection. We received this link the other day. It's news for Wilmington, but Wilmington North Carolina not Illinois. Still, it's an interesting story about dinosaurs and fossil collecting.

This is the “Fossil Friday” post #282. Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website. We will post any fossil pictures you send in to [email protected]. Please include a short description or story. Check the #FossilFriday Bluesky/Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world! The Braceville Fall 2025 Field Trip was held on the weekend of September 6th and 7th, 2025.