Conformable Contacts

Laura Keynes has joined Catholic Voices after returning to her childhood faith

"Who would have known reading the documentation for a geologic map could be so ******** fun?"

There are a number of well-known fossil beds within a few hours' drive of a some of the country's largest cities. Here are just a few of them.

Ancient Mesopotamian cylinder seals at the Louvre have pictures of 'snake-dragons' on them which bear a noticeable resemblance to dinosaurs.

"The June 2013  issue of Acts & Facts magazine from the Institute for Creation Research has a two-page article on the fossils of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. “The La Brea Tar Pits Mystery” was written by Dr. John Morris, president of ICR, and Dr. Timothy Clarey, ICR’s new staff geologist.

The article correctly states that some paleontologists have moved away from the simple “animals got stuck in the tar when they stopped for a drink of water” interpretation of the La Brea tar pits. It appears that at least some of the fossils were washed downstream from the nearby Santa Monica Mountains and became trapped in the tar. Morris and Clarey make an unjustified extrapolation from this, and claim that all of the fossils must have been transported to the La Brea site from elsewhere."

The story of the rise and fall of the moon's magnetic field constantly energizes planetary scientists.

It was 2009, and President Obama had just given a presidential address.  In a widely televised response to the address, Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana mocked the volcanic monitoring program of the U.S. Geological Survey as "wasteful spending," and proposed its elimination. Much to the relief of volcanologists and the people in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Hawaii who live near the volcanoes in the U.S., the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland the following year, and its huge global economic impact, laid that short-sighted suggestion at least temporarily to rest. 

Currently, two of Alaska's most active volcanoes have woken up and are emitting plumes of steam and ash. Pavlov (means "Paul" or "St. Paul" in Russian) became active on May 13.

"People have lived around Etna for millennia, so scientists have one of the longest documented records of activity of any volcano in the world—dating back to 1500 B.C."

Howdy! The following blog post comes to you from "Out West," the American west, where cacti bloom and flash floods create some of the most gorgeous rock formations you've ever seen.

"Not just horses and fish, but—like a whole ancient zoo buried together—lizards, alligators, stingrays, snakes, squirrel varieties, bats, long-tailed turtles, lemur-like primates, birds, frogs, insects, and sycamore, palm, and fern leaves were all fossilized in Wyoming's Green River Formation.

"A group of European scientists have announced the "discovery" of a small continent in the middle of the Indian Ocean that doesn't exist on any known map. What is this proclamation based on? It's based on the age estimates of some beach sand and a belief that the "absolute dates" the researchers determined are reliable and factual."

New “fresh flesh and blood” mammoth discovery animates clonal hopes.

"Russian scientist and head of Northeast Federal University Mammoth Museum, Semyon Grigoryev, led an expedition that was specifically looking for well-preserved mammoth remains that could possibly be used to bring mammoths back from extinction. Since parts of the permafrost in Siberia have been thawing in recent years, they believed that frozen mammoth remains might be in the process of being exposed for the first time. They thought that if they could find such remains, some of them might be well-preserved enough to contain the materials necessary for cloning, which might end up producing living mammoths!"

"In a world where things seem to change overnight, melanin seems to stay essentially the same for more than 160 million years, a new study has found."

A new magmatic model for the origin of large salt formations, where they are emplaced rapidly by igneous processes.

Gary Jackson and his dog Migaloo, trained to sniff out buried remains, work with locals to uncover archaeological sites and help Australian police locate the bodies of murder victims.

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, "Migaloo quickly located the 600-year-old remains of an indigenous Australian," which researchers found a decade ago. But that specialized training resulted in an unforeseen crossover—Migaloo can also smell fossils.