* Astronomy

Seeking Life's Imprint in Shifting Desert Sand

Our fossil-hunting grounds in Morocco included mud mounds that -- although today high and dry -- were born in a relatively shallow sea. Such submarine mud volcanoes can be the result of gas escaping from underneath Earth's crust, forcing great quantities of liquid and fine-grained rock to the surface.
To my eyes, the mounds looked like ogres in a science fiction film, the ancient vents forming drooping eyes and a sagging, crumbling mouth. The monstrous mounds remained mute during our visit, but scientists are trying to learn their story by other means.
A vein of travertine, for instance, is a clue that at least one of the mounds we visited had a hydrothermal origin. Other mounds may have been built by so-called "cold seeps," which have milder temperatures. Several mounds are lined up in a row, indicating they bubbled up along a natural fault in the Earth's crust. First identified by scientists in the 1930s, many of the Morocco mounds are made of carbonate mud (The term "mud" refers to the grain size of the rocks -- micrite and fine-silt -- rather than a composition of sediment mixed with clay).
Read more 

Suspected fossil pops up in harvester

A family from western P.E.I. found a surprise buried in their potato harvest last fall - what appears to be a fossil as old as the Island itself.
Shelley Williams of Elmsdale thought little of the strange stone, which is about the size of a large potato, when her husband Whitney and 11-year-old son George came into the kitchen with it in the autumn.
Read more

India's Jurassic Park

India's Gujarat state is home to one of the world's largest collections of dinosaur remains. The BBC's Soutik Biswas finds out how this is fuelling dinosaur tourism.
About an hour's drive from busy Ahmedabad city in India's western Gujarat state is what many call the "Jurassic Park of India" - a nod to Steven Spielberg's spell-binding dinosaur film.
Read more

'Gigantic' scorpion fossil found

The tracks of a giant eurypterid called Hibbertopterus have been found in 330 million year old rocks in the UK. It is the largest known trackway of its kind and the size suggests that Hibbertopterus was about two meters long and one meter wide.

A cast is being made of tracks left by a two-metre long ancient animal in north east Fife.
The tracks were made by a giant six-legged water scorpion called Hibbertopterus as it crawled over damp sand about 330 million years ago.
It is the largest known walking trackway of a eurypterid or any invertebrate animal.
Read more