It's Cephalopod Week!

Things are busy, so you won't hear too much from me, but it is Cephalopod Week!
Learn more about our nautiloid and coleoid friends from NPR's Science Friday.
Here's an extinct ammonoid for you from the Yale Peabody Museum:

Geolex gets a facelift

Nancy Stamm and the USGS have performed those of us who work in natural history collections a huge service by developing and maintaining the Geolex site. For those of you who don't know, this is a huge compilation of stratigraphic names from around the United States. It includes reference histories for units, preferred names, and updated names. You might be asking yourself how could it possibly get any better, right?
Well, it did. The new and improved Geolex interface is sleek and useful. Added benefits to the new version of the site include additional "Stratigraphic Resources." Here you'll find the old card files scanned and uploaded, pdfs of lexicons and stratigraphic revision papers, links to state surveys, an interactive geologic mapview, and an interactive topographic mapview.
My thanks to Nancy Stamm and her helpers at the USGS!