" The Valley of Gwangi "* (1969) is considered one of the most notable prehistoric-monster-movies of all times - this fame is based on the unusual story (adapted from a script by special effects pioneer Willis "King-Kong" O'Brien ) but more so on the stunning creature effects featured in the movie and produced by special effects legend Ray Harryhausen - who passed away today aged 92.The movie combines the western-genre with the classic monster-movie of the sixties and seventies - however the movie was released at the end of the golden age of monster-movies and the public had almost lost interest in this genre...
The first day of the " Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations " was a great success - half a million people visited the official opening of the first World's Fair at Crystal Palace, a 20 acres large greenhouse located in Hyde Park of central London...
April 19, 1770 British Captain James Cook reached for the first time the south-eastern coast of Australia. The continent of Australia had been "discovered" by Europeans already in 1606, but only in 1642 the size of the new "island" was realized...
In October 1845 British geologist Charles Lyell was visiting Boston, when he noted an advertisement proclaiming that a "Dr." Albert C. Koch would exhibit the 114-foot-long skeleton of " that colossal and terrible reptile the sea serpent " to the paying public...
Since old times people - especially geologists - speculated about the interior of Earth. The Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) imagined an allegoric center of the Earth: a frozen wasteland, not reached by the divine light, where Lucifer is entrapped in eternal ice.The French Sci-Fi author Jules Gabriel Verne (1828 - 1905) based " A Journey to the Center of the Earth " (1864) already on early science...
In a letter dated to March 30, 1759 the Italian mining engineer Giovanni Arduino (1714-1795) proposed to the physician and fossil collector Prof. Antonio Vallisnieri the subdivision of earth's crust in various classes of rocks.Based on his observations along the foothills of the Alps, Arduino recognized a stratigraphic column with 4 classes: unstratified or poorly stratified rocks (or " Primary Rocks ", survived into the 20th century as " Paleozoic "), stratified rocks (" Secondary Rocks ", or " Mesozoic "), more recent, as yet unconsolidated, sediments (" Tertiary Rocks ") and as own category volcanic rocks...
" William Smith Never saw a coccolith But using macrofossil data He ordered all the English strata " An anonymous clerihew dedicated to W. Smith William Smith , born March 23, 1769, introduced in his " Strata - Identified by organized Fossils " (1816) the " principle of faunal succession " into stratigraphy...
Dana Hunter is compiling a list of Pioneering Women in the Geosciences, so here a name closely linked with the geology of the Dolomites .The Scottish Maria Matilda Ogilvie Gordon (1864-1939, the photo shows her in 1900, image in public domain), or simply May , was the oldest daughter of a clergy family with eight children, five boys and three girls.The parents valued education and maintained connections to various schools and colleges - Maria entered Merchant Company Schools' Ladies College in Edinburgh at age of 9...
" And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. "" Beyond Good and Evil ", Aphorism 146 (1886) by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)Since prehistoric times humans ventured into caves, as proved by the discovery of rock art even in remote parts of many European cave systems...
