Museums of Vienna

Hello out there! This post marks the start of ~6 weeks of travel for me, visiting museums in Europe and doing field work with my students. As much as I love this part of the job things can get extremely busy, especially when trying to keep up with emails/demands from home. Nevertheless, I will try to blog every so often when I have something fun. And that, I have!

Last week my student Chiara and I visited Vienna (Wien), Austria! We looked at some beautiful corals at the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien and the Geologisches Bundesanstalt Museum and also toured around a bit for fun.

Here are some of the lovely corals we saw....

Phlocophylia caliculata

Stylocoenia taurinensis close up

Thamnastrea rectilamellosa corallites look like the spiderman symbol

Distichophyllia norica

Retiophyllia norica

A lost specimen... 

I think it is a Triassic Palaeastraea cyathophylloides

Once we had what we needed from the collections we perused the rest of the two museums.

 And had some Sachertorte...

 Beautiful ammonites from Canada

Some amazingly huge ooids (pisoids)

More Triassic corals

Jurassic horseshoe crabs from the Solenhofen

Solenhofen Squids

We also saw a little of Vienna

Over the weekend we visited a few sites (and got wet), then did some more sightseeing in the Alps (and got wet).

Wet corals 

Cold and wet, but there is Apfel Strudel!

Fossil Reefs around Austin

This past weekend I took my graduate level reefs class out to the field to check out some fossil reefs.
We took 2 days and saw Cretaceous coral patch reefs/biostromes, Cretaceous rudist reefs, and some Cambrian algal mounds. We covered a lot of territory but saw some great stuff!

Some lovely Cretaceous corals! A nice thick branching type

This one is weathered beautifully

There were lots of big massive/domal colonies.

Just like modern Porites!

Hard to see the outcrop, but there are still some nice corals here!

Good geology is a stroll through the wildflowers...

Some awesome borings in the Cow Creek Formation.

After the Cretaceous corals, we went to check out some Cambrian algal mounds from the Wilburns Formation.

They look even better in the cliff faces!

On Day 2, we checked out some Cretaceous rudist mounds.

What a fabulous exposure!

An awesome cross section of a Caprinid rudist.

Down into the core of the reef!

A very complicated sedimentary structure.

We tried to take a group photo, but the camera slipped....

This one was better, although I still had to dive a boulder to make it into the shot.

An awesome site!

The Prickly Pears had just started blooming

And last of all, the guard peacocks!