Digging for coal and fossils - In the mid 1800/s some fossils were found in a tributary of the Illinois river, called “Mazon Creek.” They had simply weathered out of the ground, but it wasn’t until coal mining moved in,

Yesterday, I got email from the relevant companies. The smart glasses I ordered are on the way, actually shipped this time. This marks the end of a long, and quite Ludacris saga. I wondered just how long it really has been,

Fossil casts and molds - When a creature dies and becomes buried, sometimes its remains can completely rot and dissolve away, leaving a hollow space within the rock called a mold. If that mold becomes filled with sediment and water,

Doctor Frankenstein’s favorite beer - The semiprecious stone amber is fossilized tree resin. Sometimes, insects and other small critters are trapped by sticky tree sap, and become encased in amber. Sometimes, microorganisms are found inside amber.

A walk through other dating methods - There are different candidates for the oldest preserved human footprints in North America. The older sight has a less certain date than the younger one. Today we look at ways of dating fossils,

Mystery solve, and dating fossils - It took a bit of digging, but I found out why the domestic dog fossil found with the remains of the La Brea woman didn’t cause more of a sensation. Using carbon 14 dating,

Wait… she had a dog? - The La Brea Woman was found in close association with the remains of a domesticated dog. Her remains have been dated to between 9,000 and 10,000 years ago. Were there dogs that early in North America?

Footprints in the sand, stone, and on the moon - Fossils aren’t just remains of animals. Some of them are materials and marks left by organisms as they went about their lives. Called "trace fossils," they are, instead of a snapshot of death,

The tar pit tar pits - In the previous episode we talked about where the oil that formed them came from. Today, we talk about the fossils found in them. Located in the middle of a major city, the La Brea Tar Pits have given up fossils as much as 55-th...

Fossils in fossil fuel - Around the same time that the ancestors of humans branched from the apes, organic sediments were being laid down that would eventually turn into oil. Some of this oil worked its way along fault lines,