#dinosaur
#prehistoric
#actionrpg
#cenozoic
#digitalart
#game
#hadean
#mammal
#mesozoic
#paleozoic
#precambrian
#scifi
#phanerozoic
#proterozoic
#archean
#sinapside
#dicensonia

Okay, this is the first teaser of the fauna from my project. I think this list will interest you.

Sea Pen (Charnia masoni) An extinct and possibly one of the first described forms of complex life in the Ediacaran Period (Precambrian). Very interesting life form.

The well known trilobite, possibly the most famous arthropod of the early Cambrian. Surprised at how diverse trilobites were with many genera!

Spent a few hours in the Cambrian and Ordovician periods of the #Paleozoic era.
However, my obsession has been stalled in the late-Hadean eon, #Eoarchean and #Archean eras. 🙄
#MuseumoftheEarth

Multicolor geological map of #Australia with the Yilgarn craton marked in the west in dark red. CC BY-SA 3.0.

#Geoscience #Archean #Yilgarn #Geology

Busy week for @stanforddoerr.bsky.social EPSP at #AGU25! Started with PhD student Vittorio Colicci looking for clues about #Archean environments through the deposits of some of Earth’s oldest #coastal #dune fields in South Africa (12/16 am, EP21E-1659)

New article: Archean Geodynamic Regimes of the Southeastern North China Craton: Insights from Petrological and Geochemical Constraints #Geology #EarthScience #PlateTectonics #Archean #Precambrian tinyurl.com/y2rbcxna

Report about the recent M-FED conference where I have a talk about #Archean deep water microbial mats from the new Moodies Group drill core. #geology #palaeontology

Pyritised, metamorphosed, and faulted #Archean microbial mats from South Africa. I love the colours on this one. #geology #paleontology

massive silvery hematite broken into angular fragments by later quartz veins. Canadian quarter for scale.

Massive #hematite later brecciated by quartz veining, From the Soudan ironstone, Ely greenstone belt, Vermilion district of northern Minnesota.

These ironstones are sandwiched between pillow basalts of approximately 2.7 billion years old.

#MinCup25 #Greenstone #Minnesota #Archean #IronOre

Giant lithium-rich pegmatites in Archean cratons form by remelting refertilised roots of greenstone belts - Communications Earth & Environment Melting of sanukitoid-infused basement beneath greenstone roots produced lithium-rich granites and lithium-pegmatite in the Australian Archean Cratons, according to an analysis of geochemical and isot...

~80% of the world’s hard-rock #lithium comes from #Archean #pegmatite whose formation is not fully understood. Work by Smithies et al. shows the importance of crustal boundaries and hydrous mantle-derived magma from deep metasomatized lithospheric domains. #openaccess
doi.org/10.1038/s432...

A timeline of the Earth's oceans, showing the availability of trace metals, oxidation state, and constraints on the evolutionary development of Mo-, Fe-, and V-nitrogenases, from the Archean to the present. From Rucker and Kaçar, 2024, Trends in Microbiology.

Today, molybdenum is one of the most common trace elements in the ocean due to oxidative weathering of #Molybdenite. But in the Archean the oceans were reducing, and molybdenum was scarce.

Other nitrogenases evolved to use other transition elements, but […]

[Original post on fosstodon.org]

A model of the Fe-Mo-Cofactor nitrogenase from Jiménez-Vicente et al, 2015 A complex molecule with a cage of iron and sulfur atoms connected to an organic chain via a molybdenum atom (grey).

#Molybdenite is the primary host for the element molybdenum in the Earth's crust.

Molybdenum is part of the most effective biological molecule for nitrogen fixation (Mo-nitrogenase), which converts atmospheric N2 to a bio-available form.

The grey sphere is Mo […]

[Original post on fosstodon.org]

Microscope photo of black and grey organic matter on a white background. The organic matter is fluffy and made of filaments, some of the filaments have sheets of grey organic matter stretched between them .

Photo of some organic matter from an #Archean microbial mat. This stuff has some really weird textures. This is a stack of 30 photos and the image is about 50 microns wide. #Geology #Paleontology

THE FIRST LIFE ON EARTH: Precambrian Era: • Hadean Eon: The Birth of Earth, and Volcanos and Lava. • Archean Eon: Land and Water, and Early Life the very first Cells. • Proterozoic Eon: Microscopic Life, and the very first Invertebrates. Paleozoic Era: • Cambrian Period: Age of Invertebrates, Trilobites, Arthropods, and very first fishes. • Ordovician Period: Age of Corals, Nautilus, Cephalopods, and Early Fishes. • Silurian Period: Primitive Sea Scorpions, Primitive Jawed fishes, and the very first plants. • Devonian Period: Age of Fishes, very first Trees, and very first Amphibians. • Carboniferous Period: Age of Amphibians, giant Insects, and very first Reptiles. • Permian Period: Early Primitive Reptiles, Mammal-like Reptiles, and mass extinction of Trilobites. Mesozoic Era: • Triassic Period: Age of Reptiles, very first Mammals, and very first Dinosaurs. • Jurassic Period: Age of the Dinosaurs, Sea Marine Reptiles Early Mammals, and very first Birds. • Cretaceous Period: Very first Flowers, Early Birds, Last Dinosaurs, mass extinction of the Dinosaurs, and small mammals survived. Cenozoic Era: • Paleogene Period: After Dinosaurs, Age of Mammals and Large Primitive Birds. • Neogene Period: Large Primitive Mammals, and Ape-like humans the Ape-men. • Quaternary Period: Very first Humans the Cavemen, and the Ice Age of Primitive Mammals. • Present Day: Age of Humans and Modern Animals rules the Earth.

#GeologicTimeScale:

#PRECAMBRIAN ERA:
#Hadean.
#Archean.
#Proterozoic.

#PALEOZOIC ERA:
#Cambrian.
#Ordovician.
#Silurian.
#Devonian.
#Carboniferous.
#Permian.

#MESOZOIC ERA:
#Triassic.
#Jurassic.
#Cretaceous.

#CENOZOIC ERA:
#Paleogene.
#Neogene.
#Quaternary.
#PresentDay.

#prehistoric #geologic

Left, a microscope photo of a grey flask shaped microfossil that looks like a flat sheet. Right a grey scale topographic depth map showing the fossil is not a sheet but a hollow flattened vesicle.

The photo stacking method I use gives very high resolution optical imaging. But it tends to flatten the subject because we use out of focus areas as depth cues. This #archean #acritarch for e.g. looks like a sheet, but depth map shows it has up 40 microns of relief. #geology #paleontology

Photograph of a small square of a dark grey mudstone surface covered with hundreds of sinuous and branching wrinkles

Close up of the previous photograph showing that many of the wrinkles are chains of overlapping ellipsoid and ovoid structures.

Bonus #FossilFriday These are absolutely *beautiful* #Archean microbial textures. But they are near impossible to image with my phone. I had to sell my macro photo rig because of the visa thing and it will be a while till I can afford another one.

I'll be giving a talk on our search for fossils in the 3.22 Ga #Archean Moodies group, using brand new unweathered drill core. This will be the public debut of these data which will be of interest to anyone working on early life and/or astrobiology. #Geology #Paleontology

I've been reading a lot of about #archean fossils. The search often focuses on looking for bacterial fossils. But what if were missing fossils because we are looking for the small things? The 3.2 Ga spheres from the Moodies are in the 100 um+ range for e.g. What if the methods we use to look for...

Microscope photo showing an undulose band of dark filamentous interwoven organic matter which extends from the bottom left to the top right. The layers above and below the dark layer are dirty grey and made of rounded silt grains. A red scale bar at the bottom left shows that the image is 0.3 mm across.

#ThinsectionThursday Cross section through an organic rich laminae in an #Archean deep water siltstone. Host matrix is a framework of quartz and feldspar grains with Fe-clays and an early authigenic silica cement. FOV 300 microns, Moodies Group SA #Geology #Paleontology

Exciting discussions and inspiring presentations at our DMG short course on Early Earth Evolution. Looking forward to learn much more on Archean processes!
#archean #earthsciences #geology #geochemistry #geobiology #tectonics

Earth's oldest-known impact crater discovered in outback WA The discovery of a 3.47-billion-year-old crater in WA's Pilbara region pushes back the age of the earliest-known impact site on Earth by more than one billion years.

And to think, some say that "nothing ever happens in Western Australia" 😏
#Archean

If you want to hear about some non-stromatolitic #archean microbial structures, then my EAI talk is today at 16:30.

A photo of an ancient "gopura" built atop columns made from peninsular gneiss

A carving of Hanuman

A carving of a Shivalinga into a pillar

A carving of Ganesha

Walked up Nandi Hills (or as I like to call it—the Sky Island of #Bengaluru) this morning using the trail with steps made out of #Archean peninsular #gneiss & there are some amazing archeological artifacts—here are carvings of Hanuman, Ganesha, and a Shivling etched into the pillars

#Rivers, #winds, #waves, and #impacts are all on the program for Stanford EPSP at #AGU24! Come along with us to explore #landscapes through #space (#Earth, #Moon, #Mars) and #time ( #Archean / #Hesperian to #future)

All times EST.

(1/10)

microscope photograph of a siltstone. The bottom half is composed of finely layered organic matter in the shape of shark fin. The upper half is composed of grey chert grains, white quartz grains, and black organic matter.

#ThinSectionThursday This cute little tuft of organic matter in an #Archean marine siltstone. The dark stuff is filamentous organic matter. Some of the large filaments are visible in the matrix. View is 2.5 mm across. #Geology #Paleontology

Registration is now open for our short course on #EarlyEarth running 25-28th March 2025!
Sign up for an exciting interdisciplinary course covering research topics such as #tectonics #geochemistry #Archean #metamorphism #geobiology #provenanceanalysis #petrology #geochronology

Four billion years ago, but not so different: Plate tectonics likely looked closer to what we experience today In a new study, a team of researchers suggests that 4 billion years ago, plate tectonics likely looked closer to what we experience today than previously thought. The team published its findings in th...

Honored to have our recent PNAS publication featured in a NSF press-release! Check it out to read about what #zircon geochemistry can tell us about tectonic diversity in the #Archean! phys.org/news/2024-09...

New paper out in PNAS featuring #zircon #geochemistry from two of the oldest fragments of continental crust! People often talk about a transition from stagnant-to mobile-lid tectonics during the #Archean, but our results reveal early tectonic diversity! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Doing image stacks of thin sections of #Archean cherts I'm working on. There are some really weird textures that look like a H.R. Giger landscape made of weird faces. 😅 #Geology ⚒️

New #Geological Study Shows #Scandinavia Was Born In #Greenland
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tinyurl.com/4dv7adur
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doi.org/10.1130/G516...
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#geology #structuralgeology #finland #research #crust #mantle #zircon #gneiss #denmark #craton #lithosphere #shield #FennoscandianShield #Archean #Eoarchean #geologymap #mapping