This month Dr Joe Botting shared his exciting finds from the Castle Bank site with us. The site has yielded Burgess Shale-like creatures and, if proved correct, some of his discoveries could mean that some groups of animals evolved way before the Cretaceous when they were thought to have appeared. These could be huge discoveries and may mean that science has to rethink the molecular clock model.
The video of his talk will be available on the Communities YouTube Channel from 10am on 19th October via the link below:
Recordings of earlier U3A Communities Geology meetings can be found on the Geology playlist:
If you didn’t join the call and want to catch up, watch it again or just want more geology in your life please do take a look.
Here are a few related resources that might be of interest.
- Wikipedia page on Castle Bank – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bank
The BBC featured the discovery https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-65450335 and the Museum of Wales published an article on Castle Bank – https://museum.wales/blog/2511/A-new-Welsh-treasure-trove-of-very-special-fossils/
Joe also has a YouTube channel with lots of videos about his finds – https://www.youtube.com/@lifethroughtime1811
If you want to find out more about the Burgess Shales there is of course Stephen Jay Gould’s marvellous book ‘Wonderful Life’ and one of our members kindly sent me this link:
https://share.google/Ehl0edRWtgsJ97Wx3
Hope these are of interest and look out for the invitation to next months meeting when we’ll be hearing a out Medicine and Geology.
If you aren’t a member, it’s free to join here https://u3acommunities.org/geology-forum/.