Tag Archives: Yimin Formation

Return to the Middle Kingdom and the Early Cretaceous!

After three and half years we made the journey back to China and back to the Early Cretaceous of Inner Mongolia.  We know that it was hot in the Early Cretaceous, even at high latitudes such as that of Inner Mongolia but our first stop in Beijing had us sweating and swearing in very real […]

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Wildfires in the Cretaceous!

Wildfires are in the news lately, but if you were in the Hailar Basin, Inner Mongolia during the Early Cretaceous (~100 million years ago) you’d find yourself in a lot of smoke! Even though it was tough times for vegetation, the palaeomires were able to accumulate incredible thicknesses of peat – enough to make 70 […]

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Carbon Accumulation and Loss in the Cretaceous

On the 7th of June, 9pm Brisbane, Australia time I’ll be giving an invited lecture on some of the palaeoclimate, palaeovegetation and palaeotectonic studies we’ve been doing in the Hailar Basin, Inner Mongolia, China. This is for The Society for Organic Petrology. Read the abstract for the talk below. It’s ONLINE and Open to All! […]

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ANGIOSPERMS NOT YET MIRE PLANTS: NEW PAPER OUT

Excellent paper* just out by Alex Wheeler reconstructing palaeoclimate and palaeoecology in the Early Cretaceous of Inner Mongolia. Amazing what studying organics can tell you!!! I was lucky enough to work on this paper with him and co-authors Prof Jian Shen, Dr Marvin Moroeng,and Dr Jingjing Liu. We did the sampling of this back in […]

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Something Wicked This Way Comes* – in the Lower Cretaceous

No, not a dinosaur. Not an asteroid. But some kind of climatic condition that was none-to-good for organic material. For a very very long time. Over the last year, my colleagues Prof Jian Shen and Prof Marvin Moroeng from China University of Mining and Technology (Xuzhou, China) and University of Johannesburg (South Africa), respectively, and […]

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(Not) Freezing in Inner Mongolia

Thirty seconds seems like an incredibly short amount of time. But a lot of things can happen in thirty seconds. I had removed one of my gloves to turn the page in my field notebook to jot down some measurements on the coal we were sampling. It was a bad idea. In that short amount […]

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