Scientists on Monday announced the discovery of what appears to be the world's most intact dinosaur mummy: a 67-million-year-old plant-eater that contains fossilized bones and skin tissue, and possibly muscle and organs.

Andrew C. Revkin: NASA's James Hansen makes case for returning CO2 levels to those of 1988.

Yale researchers have created a new dataset tracking air temperatures above the Earth's surface over recent decades. Corrections applied by an advanced method reveal that the middle and upper troposphere (3-14 km altitude) have been warming faster than indicated by uncorrected datasets.

Prof. Jun Korenaga was awarded for his proposal
entitled "How to build a habitable planet: Estimating the physics of plate-tectonic convection on Earth". He is one of ten winners of Microsoft's newly created award program.

The department has been awarded an NSF (IF/EAR-0744154) grant for a new instrument upgrade to the electron-microprobe-analysis (aka EMPA or EPMA) laboratory. This award was facilitated by very generous matching funds from Yale University. An order has now been submitted for the JEOL JXA-8500F (field-emission-gun=FEG) "Hyperprobe". This machine will permit imaging of nanometerscale features and analytical (chemical) resolution of features perhaps as small as 200nm. This analytical resolution applies to both quantitative analysis and extremely high-resolution chemical mapping. For more information on the microprobe lab, including SEM capabilities, please visit http://earth.geology.yale.edu/~joe2/microprobe.html.

The rich Earth history that has thus far been discovered hails predominantly from the Phanerozoic Eon, the ca. 540 million years since the explosion of the scrutinized fossil record. The preceding Proterozoic Eon is 1900 million years long yet relatively untouched. In the Proterozoic, only paleomagnetic data can provide quantitative constraints on the paleogeography of ancient continents and their more ancient building blocks, 'cratons'. Sampling ancient lavas for their paleomagnetic directions, Ross plans to investigate two large questions about global evolution about 2 billion years ago: (1)was plate tectonics an active process on Earth already?, and (2) did the early cratons collide at different times to form several separate "supercratons" or did they form one, long-lived, and globe-girdling supercontinent? He and his advisor David Evans have selected field sites on the Wyoming craton (WY and MT) and the Slave craton (Northwest Territories of Canada): the last remaining puzzle pieces to place in hopes of documenting the making of the North American continent.