Geonews clips – March 18, 2008:

• Kilauea- The ongoing eruption of Kilauea volcano has destroyed almost 200 structures and buried almost nine miles of highway. Current activity includes lava continuing to flow into the ocean at two locations. A new crater gas vent has also formed and is spewing sulfur dioxide at record rates.

• Ice Age Axes – A Dutch amateur archaeologist found 28 100,000-year-old axes in gravel dredged from the North Sea. These axes were presumably used by mammoth hunters who roamed the area now covered by the North Sea.

• Dino-Era Feathers – Seven perfectly preserved feathers of approximately 100 million years in age were found encased in amber in western France. Because the feathers have feather-like fibers associated with some two-legged dinosaurs and some features of modern bird feathers, they could provide data on a significant stage in feather evolution.

• Fossil Primates Inhabited North America Before Europe? – Chris Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, discovered a 55 million year-old primate fossil. The fossil came from the Gulf Coastal plain of Mississippi, and is a very primitive relative of tarsiers, which now live in southeast Asia. The age of this fossil find suggests that primates inhabited North America prior to their occurrence in Europe.
  
  Links for these news stories are at:
  http://www.earthmaps.com/geology_news.htm

Geonews clips – March 5, 2008:

• The “Monster” – a newly identified fossil marine reptile - was excavated last summer on Norway’s Arctic island, Spitsbergen. At about 50 feet in length, this pliosaur is one of the largest marine reptiles ever found. Pliosaurs were the top marine predators during the Jurassic period (200 to 145 million years ago).
  

• A catastrophic flood is probably the reason for an earth-cooling event that happened about 8,000 years ago. Canadian geologists believe that a huge glacial lake that covered parts of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario, North Dakota, and Minnesota rapidly drained, sending a flow of water 15 times greater than the current discharge of the Amazon River into the Hudson Strait and Labrador Sea. By some estimates, sea level rose up to 45 feet, and Western Europe cooled by about 3 degrees Celsius for 200-400 years.

• A shift in tectonic plates? Some geologists now have direct evidence of how and when tectonic plates descend into the deeper parts of the Earth. Contrary to current theory, it appears that denser plates are more likely to hold in the upper mantle while lighter plates sink faster into the lower mantle. The denser plates usually flatten when they reach the upper-lower mantle boundary; the lighter plates are more likely to fold above the boundary of the lower mantle for 10’s of millions of years. Once a critical mass is attained, they then descend quickly into the lower mantle.

• A recently found fossil bat may be the key to knowing whether bats could fly before they developed their internal sonar navigation system. The fossil bat was found in the Green River Formation of Wyoming and is about 52 million years old. Because the fossil bat lacked the skull features necessary for echolocation, it now seems likely that bats could fly prior to developing their internal sonar for navigating and hunting.

Links for these news stories are at:

http://www.earthmaps.com/geology_news.htm