Famous prehistoric mammals
2024-09-09 13:04 After the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass-extinction it took 15 million years for the world to recover.  Mammals and birds then evolved to take over the role of the dinosaurs.  Towards the end whales arose too take over after the plesiosaurs.
On the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass-extinction
2024-09-02 12:16 The world looked a bit differently 66 million years ago.  Pangaea had splintered into Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Eurasia, North America and South America.  Antarctica was connected to Australia, and Eurasia to North America.
Contemporary with the dinosaurs
2024-08-29 12:25 Plants has changed much since the time of the dinosaurs.  However, not so very much as many imagine.  Mosses, lycophytes and ferns existed long before the dinosaurs.
Real dinosaurs
2024-08-17 19:29 Some perceive dinosaurs as entertainment for children.  Dinosaurs are actually subject to scientific investigation.  As they are described today they make sense to me.  They make as much sense as platypuses, kangaroos and bats.
On the Permian-Triassic mass extinction
2024-08-12 12:53 At the end of the Permian Pangaea was born.  Africa, Antarctica, Australia, South America and South Asia had long held together.  It is probably rather obvious how Africa and South America were stuck together.
Plate tectonics and the origin of the continents
2024-06-28 12:53 Most know about continental drift.  What not as many know about, is the greater plate tectonics.  The Earth’s crust is divided in 8 – 10 pieces at least the size of continents.  (Two of the pieces are on the way to split in two each.)
The basics of geology
2024-06-23 17:03 Uniformitarianism is based on the idea of geology being explainable in terms of directly observable processes.  Certainly, processes can take place at different paces.  But this is still the same processes at different orders of magnitude.
The primeval myth
2024-06-13 13:53 I state points in prehistoric times for a good reason.  There is a myth of a vague “primeval time” when everything one knows about lived at the same time.  Then I mean different animals, larger than current ones and more or less strange.
Has the world ever frozen over?
2024-06-05 13:16 There is a hypothesis that the Earth at one or several points would have been entirely covered by ice.  This is called Snowball Earth and is a controversial idea.  All the suggested points have their own problems.
Icehouse Earth and ice ages
2024-05-31 13:02 The climate during the last 550 million years is rather well-documented.  There have been several periods of tens of millions of years without any ice sheets.  The greenhouse effect was then considerably stronger than it is today.