Category: Stories in Stone Blog

The Virtual Book Tour of Stories in Stone

Greetings all. My new book Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology has now been out for about seven weeks. It has been exciting to see the response to it from friends, colleagues, fellow geologists, and people I don’t know. One response I did get was the suggestion of putting together a blog book tour, where I visit with other bloggers and discuss my book. In that light, I wanted to send out an advance notice that my tour will start next week.

My first stop will be at Clastic Detritus on Tuesday, August 18. Brian Romans has been kind enough to also give advance warning of the tour with his post today. He will also post a review of Stories in Stone on August 17, followed by our Q&A on Tuesday.

From Brian and his sedimentary focus, I turn on August 19 to architecture with John Hill’s A Daily Dose of Architecture. John sent me links to a variety of buildings that use stone and asked for my commentary on them.

I end the week, August 21, at my friend Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s The Tangled Nest. I will be writing a post for her tying together our interest in being urban naturalists, a topic she writes about in her wonderful new book, The Crow Planet.

On Monday, August 24, I return to geology with a Q&A on Brian Switek’s Laelaps. Brian has also kindly posted a review of Stories in Stone.

Two days later, August 26, you can hear my interview with Michael Bradbury, the driving force behind the web site Real Science. During a 45-minute-long interview we chat about deep time, granite countertops and radiation, and whether science influences the use of building stone. You will have to listen to find out the exciting answer!

At the end of the week, August 28, I head to Gina Hagler’s blog, Synthesis. Given Gina’s focus on looking at everything from sports to birds to writing, I am sure our discussion will be engaging.

Next, I head (well virtually) across the Atlantic on August 31 to Michael Welland’s Through the Sandglass. A fellow author, Michael has written the well-received Sand: The Never Ending Story.

And finally, to end the tour, on September 2 I get to bring together two passions of mine, bicycling and stone, on Tom Furtwangler’s colorful and ever enjoyable bikejuju.

Please feel free to hop in at any time and join the discussion. I look forward to hearing from others.

Brownstone Tombstones

Continuing my theme of tombstones, I would like to turn to a singular grave marker in Middletown, Connecticut, just across the border from the old brownstone quarries in Portland. I believe this may be the only tombstone with dinosaur tracks on it. It honors Joseph Barrett, an M.D., though judging from the stone, he was equally as proud to be a botanist and geologist. Who wouldn’t?

Barrett was well known in the area for his passion for tracks. His obituary in the New York Times read “So deeply was he engaged in this work that he neglected his profession and became a monomaniac on the subject of bird tracks. He saw all manner of fossils in city walks which no other eyes were able to see, and in his peregrinations about the town would stop suddenly, look at a stone, bring out a sheet of wrapping paper and, laying it out on the walk, draw upon it whatever his fancy painted, write the place where the stone lay and date its discovery.” Oh, to be able to see those drawings!

Barrett also regularly supplied tracks to Edward Hitchcock, who taught at Amherst College and is considered the father of ichnology. Hitchcock never could admit that dinosaurs made the tracks; birds were the track makers.
When Barrett died, according to brownstone historian Alison Guinness, the local quarries donated two slabs of stone. You can find the facts on the smooth face. You can also see how brownstone weathers, peeling off layer by layer like sunburned skin. The back side, though, is the face to explore. Several three-toed tracks can be seen crossing at angles to each other. The most obvious one is just to the left of center, next to a round white lichen. Another one is a few inches down and to left. They have been designated as Grallator formosus and Brontozoum sillimanicum.

The back side of Barrett’s tombstone. Note the various tracks of three-toed dinosaurs.
The second slab, which the first sits on, has two tree casts. In addition, you can see where it says “The Testimony of the Rocks.” This book, written by Scottish geologist Hugh Miller and published the year after his death in 1857, is a curious combination of anti-evolution but supportive of a great age for the Earth.

Together these two slabs are certainly a wonderful tombstone testimony to the passion of a man for the stone and the fossils he loved.