I know this looks first and foremost like a coffee table book, but what a picture and coffee table book! And, unlike such books, the undoubtedly chatty text is well worth reading. This is a great book for those who love palaeontology.
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This is the first of a two-part series of monographs on spiders (and arachnids more generally) involving Dr David Penney and published by Siri Scientific Press – the other is reviewed at: Fossil Arachnids: Monograph Series Vol 2. This one is written with Dr Paul Selden, who has more than 30 years of researching, and teaching about, fossil arachnids.
This Dunedin Academic press guide provides, at an introductory level, a succinct and readable guide to metamorphism. As readers will know, metamorphic rocks are one of the three main types of rocks.
I’ve been waiting for a book like this for a very long time and am delighted that a publication of this quality has now arrived. New books covering British palaeontology are always welcome.
This beautiful, richly illustrated book was published by a group of sabre-tooth experts. It describes, in detail, the osteology of Xenosmilus and all skeletal elements are depicted in great detail.
This is a nice little guide for the non-specialist collector of all things that go bump from above (and the effects they have on the rocks they impact).
The second edition of this guide is written to explain the key concepts of tectonics and rock structures to students and to interested amateurs. I have reviewed a number of Graham Park’s books in recently years (see below) and he is clearly a prolific and excellent writer of books about the earth sciences.
Ever since Charles Darwin pointed out the problem, evolutionary biologists have been worried by the incompleteness of the fossil record. Fortunately, discoveries of formations containing exceptionally preserved fossils (conservation Lagerstätten) have provided fascinating and important information on the history life’s diversity.
In this second edition, Dougal Jerram has revised and updated the 2001 version, first published by Alwyn Scarth and Jean-Claude Tanguy. This is to reflect modern research and understanding of Europe’s volcanoes of the last 10,000 years (active, dormant and extinct).
I like palaeoart. A while ago, I went to the ‘Dinosaurs of China’ exhibition in Nottingham and bought myself a copy of the Chinese palaeoartist, Zhao Chuang’s ‘The Age of Dinosaurs’ – a veritable picture-fest of up-to-date reconstructions of ancient beasts and plants, complete with fuzzy raptors and other bird-like therapods.
This is another of the GA’s short guides, being only 21 pages long and therefore easy to put in a cagoule pocket. Importantly, the five excursions described in the guide are centred on the city of Plymouth. Therefore, the logistics necessary to visit the itineraries should be relatively easy.
The Crowood Press are really developing a nice little series of books on the landscape and geology of select regions of the British Isles, and Tony Waltham’s addition to the series about the Peak District is well worth a read. This new one follows the same format as the others – beautiful, full colour photos and diagrams, a fascinating chapter on each of the important geological and geomorphological aspects of the area (including buildings and industry), and an author who knows his stuff and can write it down with an easy and authoritative style.
This is an ambitious little field guide, which aims to allow amateurs to identify basic rocks and rock formations, for the first time, in a systematic way., as it says: “… using only careful observation, a magnifying glass, a pocket knife – and a bit of patience”.
This GA guide is stated to be a “Geology Teaching Trail”. Well, it may be, but when I ambled along the trail with the guide in my hand, I certainly wasn’t in a teaching situation. Rather, I was out for a nice walk and a guide to explain what I was seeing. And it did just that and the classic Silurian/Ordovician unconformity you can see was just that. Classic!
Fossil Hunting along the Jurassic Coast is presented by Dr Colin Dawes, a well-known, fossil hunting guide in the world-famous palaeontological site of Lyme Regis.
West Dorset is rightly famous for its fossils, but few people visit its wonderful, fossiliferous cliffs to look at them as landforms, rather than as an endless source of ammonites and belemnites. This guide does just that and, covers a series of itineraries in the context of landform type.
Shropshire is one of my favourite areas for both geology and fossil collecting. The Silurian of this beautiful area is fascinating and, if you can get permission to get into one of the commercial quarries (and you will need permission), then the results will be remarkable.
Mountains: The origins of the Earth’s mountain systems is written for readers with an interest in mountains and in developing their understanding of the geological processes that create them.
This GA guide is intended as a major guidebook to the exposures of highly significant Precambrian, Carboniferous and Permo-Triassic sediments, through to Jurassic rocks of the East Midlands. Personally, it is an area I only partly know (I know Edale in the Peak District quite well) and, for that reason, is an interesting set of locations for me.
Sea level change is something that probably everyone who does their best to keep up to date about climate change, thinks they know about and on which they will have an opinion. However, this guide clearly shows that there are important misconceptions about the topic, and recent newspaper articles, TV and radio presentations unfortunately tend to bear little relation to reality.
By David N Thomas and David G Bowers The extent to which our planet is covered by oceans and seas (about 70%), and the increasing concern that right-minded people have about climate change, means that there is a both a desire and an urgent need…
This is another lovely guide by the GA to an area that perhaps readers would not associate with good geology. But, of course, that is because of its title, because the areas like Pendle Hill and Derbyshire are wonderful, not just to visit for their geology, but also for their holiday appeal.
This is one of GA’s little guides to a very specific area. This one is West Cornwall, a holiday destination that I recently visited during which I spent some time looking at the geology, along with the gardens and archaeological sites.
I love the Scottish Highlands and I am proud to say that I have climbed many of the mountains covered in the glossy hardback. But, as I say in the other book review on this page, it is more than a picture book. It contains some excellent and fascinating science explaining their outstanding beauty.
The aim of the guide is to help professional and interested amateur geologists to investigate the rocks themselves and to put them in a modern scientific context.
After having favourably reviewed the first two books in this three part series, I must admit I was very much looking forward to the publication of this last one. And, of course, I wasn’t disappointed. This is the third in a series of guides to safe and responsible fossil collecting along (this time), the East Dorset coast from the Chalk cliffs at Bat’s Head, across what are some of Dorset’s more remote coastal locations, to Hengistbury Head.
