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I have a hard time wrapping my head around geological time scales. Most people do. Our comparatively short lifespans prevent us from truly comprehending the age of the earth, the age of life on earth, or even the age of our own species.* Last year, I got curious about how old the oldest drawing ever found is.** OK, wow. Mind is blown, and now I have one more astonishing date that I am struggling to grasp - 73,000 years. A drawing, made by anatomically modern humans, 73,000 years ago. Roughly 2,608 generations have lived and died since then. Image by...

It's pretty obvious where stick agate gets it's name, but I am always curious about how stones are formed. It looks like a jumble of needles frozen in ice. How does that happen? To talk about how we end up with the tiny wonders that are stick agates, we need to talk about pseudomorphs first. You are probably familiar with a few already but may not have realized it - fossilized dino bone and petrified wood are both pseudomorphs. The name alone gives us a great place to start, it literally translates to “false forms”. That doesn’t mean that these...

Let’s just get into it - dinosaurs pooped and sometimes that poop fossilized and these two facts have brought an incredible amount of joy to my life. That’s right, we’re talking coprolites! Of course, other animals pooped too and their poop also fossilized. Coprolites are any fossilized feces from any animal, and I am a big fan of all of them. a coprolite from South Carolina,  between 5 and 23 million years old Coprolites are trace fossils, meaning they are not fossils of the animal itself but rather a record of a behaviour performed by that animal, like a footprint...

Fossilized wood vs petrified wood, what's the difference? Is there a difference?! Turns out it is kind of simple and also kind of complicated. Petrifaction is a type of fossilization, so all petrified wood is fossilized wood but not all fossilized wood has been petrified. To be considered petrified, the cells of the original organism had to have been replaced by minerals via permineralization so that a record of the internal structures are preserved. This is in contrast to cast fossils where the entire original organism decomposed leaving a cavity which was then filled in with minerals. That was a...

First things first…. ”Enhydros” is a bit of a misnomer. It is a trade name given to minerals that have fluid inclusions, which would be all fine and great except that Enhydros are already a thing* so it can be a little confusing if you are doing a geology/mineralogy deep dive. If you are not looking to get all nerdy and just want to browse for cool stones and jewelry with million+ year old time capsules inside, then asking for/searching for enhydros will probably get you what you’re after. Sorry to start this one off on the pedantic side, but...