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"McNamara, Ken"
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Unearthing the Underworld
A geological saga that digs deep, revealing how even the most ordinary rocks can be stepping stones to the hidden history of our planet. Unearthing the Underworld reveals the hidden world of rocks—the keepers of secrets of past environments, changing climates, and the pulse of life over billions of years. Even the most seemingly ordinary stone can tell us much about the history of this planet, opening vistas of ancient worlds of ice, raging floods, strange unbreathable atmospheres, and prehistoric worlds teeming with life. Remarkably, many types of rocks owe their existence to living organisms—from the remains of bodies of dead animals to rocks formed from rotting ancient forests, or even created by the activity of fungi, bacteria, and viruses. Anything but dull and uninteresting, rocks are intriguing portals that illuminate the secret underworld upon which we live.
eBook
Unearthing the underworld : a natural history of rocks
A geological saga that digs deep, revealing how even the most ordinary rocks can be stepping stones to the hidden history of our planet.-- Amazon.com.
Book
Dragons' Teeth and Thunderstones
For at least half a million years, people have been doing some very strange things with fossils. Long before a few seventeenth-century minds started to decipher their true, organic nature, fossils had been eaten, dropped in goblets of wine, buried with the dead, and adorned bodies. What triggered such curious behavior was the belief that some fossils could cure illness, protect against being poisoned, ease the passage into the afterlife, ward off evil spirits, and even kill those who were just plain annoying. But above all, to our early prehistoric ancestors, fossils were the very stuff of artistic inspiration. Drawing on archaeology, mythology, and folklore, Ken McNamara takes us on a journey through prehistory with these curious stones, and he explores humankind's unending quest for the meaning of fossils.
eBook
Pinnacles
On the coast north of Perth is one of the most unusual landscapes in all Australia the Pinnacles Desert. Out of the bare, yellow, shifting sands rise thousands of huge, limestone pillars. Massive and immobile in such a stark landscape, these grotesquely sculptured stone columns look as if they have stood for ages. What exactly are pinnacles? How did they form? What natural processes were able to create such spectacular structures: And what can they tell us about the evolution of the coastal scenery of this part of Australia? This beautifully illustrated book addresses all these questions in clear, concise language.
eBook
Early evidence of xeromorphy in angiosperms: Stomatal encryption in a new eocene species of Banksia (Proteaceae) from Western Australia
• Premise of the study: Globally, the origins of xeromorphic traits in modern angiosperm lineages are obscure but are thought to be linked to the early Neogene onset of seasonally arid climates. Stomatal encryption is a xeromorphic trait that is prominent in Banksia, an archetypal genus centered in one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems, the ancient infertile landscape of Mediterranean-climate southwestern Australia.• Methods: We describe Banksia paleocrypta, a sclerophyllous species with encrypted stomata from silcretes of the Walebing and Kojonup regions of southwestern Australia dated as Late Eocene.• Key results: Banksia paleocrypta shows evidence of foliar xeromorphy ∼20 Ma before the widely accepted timing for the onset of aridity in Australia. Species of Banksia subgenus Banksia with very similar leaves are extant in southwestern Australia. The conditions required for silcrete formation infer fluctuating water tables and climatic seasonality in southwestern Australia in the Eocene, and seasonality is supported by the paucity of angiosperm closed-forest elements among the fossil taxa preserved with B. paleocrypta. However, climates in the region during the Eocene are unlikely to have experienced seasons as hot and dry as present-day summers.• Conclusions: The presence of B. paleocrypta within the center of diversity of subgenus Banksia in edaphically ancient southwestern Australia is consistent with the continuous presence of this lineage in the region for ≥40 Ma, a testament to the success of increasingly xeromorphic traits in Banksia over an interval in which numerous other lineages became extinct.
Journal Article
Prehistoric Mammals
In 1909 a rich accumulation of many thousands of bones was excavated from Mammoth Cave in Australia's south-west.Many of the bones far exceeded in size any modern-day native mammal, evidence that in prehistoric times giant mammals had roamed the Australian bush.
eBook