News

This post is a response on behalf of the Department of Earth Sciences to an open letter sent by undergraduates, postgraduates and post-docs prompted by the current vocalisation around racial injustice, and in particular the Black Lives Matter movement. The letter raises concerns about the Department and wider Earth science sector’s track records o…

359 million years ago, at the end of Devonian times, life on Earth suffered a catastrophic extinction—the cause of which has puzzled geologists for decades. Land plants and freshwater life were affected particularly badly. However, unlike other major extinctions, there is no evidence to suggest that major volcanic eruptions or asteroid impacts were…

Zircons, and their microscopic mineral inclusions, from an ancient outcrop of Jack Hills, Western Australia, have been at the centre of an intense geological debate: When did the Earth first create a magnetic field? Previous studies have suggested that these minerals record traces of Earth’s magnetic field dated as far back as 4.2 billion years ago…

New chemical analyses of dinosaur eggshell by Dr Robin Dawson (Yale University), Dr Daniel Field (University of Cambridge), and colleagues from the US, Canada and Israel, show that representatives of all three major dinosaur groups were endothermic (i.e., warm-blooded). As such, thermal-regulation is likely to have been the ancestral condition for …

According to Cambridge geologist Neil S. Davies and colleagues, Shakespeare was on the right track—again. Earth’s surface is indeed the stage upon which life has strutted its stuff, and has done so for the last 3.8 billion years. Billions of organisms have graced this stage, making their entrances and exits, but what was the impact of these ‘actors…

A single fossil bone found in Japan is ruffling a few feathers in the world of avian palaeontology. It belongs to a relative of the little auk or dovekie, today the most common seabird and top avian predator in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. At around 700,000 years old, the fossil’s presence in Japan indicates that during the ‘Ice Age’, the little…

Arts Council England has announced that the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences is among 28 organisations to be awarded Designation Development Funding. A total of £2.1 million has been awarded across the country, drawn from the National Lottery, with the Sedgwick Museum receiving £89,406The Sedgwick Museum will create a world leading centre for rese…

Announced today, Dr Field, University Lecturer in Evolutionary Palaeobiology, has been named a recipient of a Future Leaders Fellowship by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Dr Field is an expert on the origins and evolution of birds, and his award, entitled 'Modernisation, diversification, and domination: Macroevolutionary origins of living bird d…

Global environmental change is generally bad news for life on Earth. But the future may not be entirely doom and gloom. Cambridge biologist Luca Telesca and colleagues have conducted the first large-scale examination of natural variation in biomineralisation in ecologically and economically important Atlantic mussel species Mytilus edulis and M. tr…

Richard Harrison (Fitzwilliam 1990), Professor of Earth and Planetary Materials and Fellow of St Catharine’s College, will take over as Head of Department on 1st August 2019.Richard was both an undergraduate and graduate student in the Department. After spending nearly five years as a post-doctoral researcher at the Institut für Mineralogie in Müns…

Perching birds, ranging from sparrows, tits and jays to the South African White-bellied Sunbird, form the largest and most diverse group of living birds. With over 6,000 species belonging to 143 families, the passerines, as they are technically known, have had astonishing evolutionary and geographical success. Within the last 45 million years they …

Congratulations to Professor Marian Holness, Dr Nigel Woodcock and Dr Brendan McCormick Kilbride who each received awards from the Geological Society of London. The awards were presented on President's Day on 6 June 2019.Marian Holness, Professor of Petrology, received the Murchison Medal. The medal is awarded annually to a scientist who has made a…

A team led by Cambridge Earth Sciences' Joshua Einsle and Richard Harrison have used advanced microscopy techniques and numerical simulations to gain new insight into the formation, composition and magnetic behaviour of the meteoritic composite known as the ‘cloudy zone’.The iron-nickel composite material known as the 'cloudy zone' is only found in…

Have you ever wondered why the Megalodon shark became to be so big? Or wondered why some other sharks are much smaller?New research from an international team of scientists including Cambridge Earth Sciences' Dr Daniel Field, led by Swansea University’s Dr Catalina Pimiento, examines the biological traits of all sharks and rays before running a ser…

A team of scientists and engineers from the University of Cambridge and the British Antarctic Survey has successfully drilled over 650 metres in to an Antarctic ice cap to obtain an ice core that will show how the West Antarctic Ice Sheet responds to warming.The team, now consisting of six people, has been at Skytrain Ice Rise for the last seven we…