I went to the Gray Fossil Site in east Tennessee and saw these awesome exhibits. The animals there fell into sinkholes in the early Pliocene. I love time travelling into the presence of Short-faced Bears, Saber-toothed Cats, Mastodons, Rhinos, Alligators, Tapirs, and other megafauna wandering around the karst topography of the Appalachians not long ago!! (Geologically speaking). What a thrill to know there was a whole other world, right here.
#Geology #Fossils #paleontology #Appalachians

A very excited field geologist (me!) standing on a talus pile of ravelled sandstone below a west-dipping back thrust fault within the Rockcastle Conglomerate Fm, Roane County, Tennessee, off SR001(US70). This is at the transition between the Valley and Ridge and the Cumberland Plateau, near the structural front, or the point of western most deformation of the Alleghanian orogeny, the major collisional event that smashed and crashed and formed Pangea
#geology #fieldgeology #fault #Appalachians

Congrats to @botanicolas and Shweta Basnet for their great talks today! #EspindoLab 💪🏼 #Entomology #UMD

@botanicolas: bait development and sequencing for the #plant genus #Calceolaria 🧬 [keep an eye out for the publication!!]

#Fulbright post-doc @shwetabasnett@twitter.com: relationships between #floral traits, #pollinators and #climate for Rhododendron across two continents (#Himalayas and the #Appalachians) 🐦 🐝 🦋 [also keep an eye out for her paper!]

A little geological history.

The Appalachian mountains where most US coal deposits are found are part of an ancient mountain range that was originally part of Pangea, and whose remants are now found in Morocco (part of the Atlas range believe), Spain, England, Wales, and Scotland, France, Germany, and wherever Silesia and/or Galecia are now found, Czechia and Slovakia, perhaps Poland, AFAIR.

And there's coal found along most of those regions also, for the same reasons it's found in the US: ancient forests, possibly swamps, with high productivity and for reasons still not entirely clear, little decomposition of the fallen timber (the lignan hypothesis still has currency). The countries in which these mountains and coal deposits are found is where you'll find most of the first industrialised countries as well.

And when I say ancient I mean ancient. Literally older than dirt, as the ranges formed from 300 to 400 mya, before life had colonised land, which means before there was an accumulation of plant material on land, let alone decomposers and burrowing animals such as worms which are key in soil formation.

Odder yet: there's a river which flows through the Appalachians which is thought to be older than the mountain range itself.

The river is of course named New.

#Geology #Appalachians #Pangea #Coal #NewRiver