Rock and Roll
Mark McMenamin, a paleontologist and professor of geology at MhC, spent three weeks this summer studying rocks in the Boston Basin near hingham, Massachusetts. But they weren’t just any rocks. these rocks were fossils of some of the oldest complex life forms on the planet. McMenamin and a group of geology students from across the country, together with a colleague from the university of Pittsburgh, determined not only that these 575 million-year-old fossils of the soft-bodied organisms called the ediacara biota were exactly that (which had been in question) but also that they had lived in beach environments, and not just in deep water, as is the general consensus among paleontologists. An abstract with the group’s findings will be presented to the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting in November and “will shake things up quite a bit,” says McMenamin. —M.H.B.
Photo by Paul Schnaittacher
