Michigan's State Stone - Petoskey

Here are some pictures of Michigan's state stone Hexagonaria polished coral (aka Petoskey stone). It was named their state stone in 1965 by Govenor George Romney while their state fossil is the mastondon (Mammut americanum).

The Hexagonaria coral is from the Devonian Period and quite attractive when polished. According to Wikipedia.org they are found in Gravel Point Formation of the Traverse Group of Michigan, USA. The stones are named after an Ottawa Chief Pet-O-Sega (Petosegay) whose land the stones were found on.

Thanks to Vic for the fossil specimens.

Learn more at the Wikipedia.org entry on Petoskey stones.

Smithsonian X 3D Beta Web Site

I am excited to see this web site created by the United States premier museum. Museum collections tend to be vast and hard to show to the general public. So many specimens are kept in storage and probably hardly seen even by researchers and curators.  3D technology and the Internet have a way of unlocking these collections for a large segment of the population to share in the wonders of all these artifacts. Go to their web site at http://3d.si.edu/ to check it out! As of this writing they have 20 models to view including 3 whale fossils and a mammoth.

In order to view the Smithsonian X 3D Beta site your browser needs to support WebGL. As of this writing Google Chrome (version 30+) and Firefox (version 24+) can be used. Internet Explorer 11 when released should work. Apple Safari needs to have its default setting change to Enable WebGL. Apple iOS does not support WebGL right now.

The interface is smooth and rotation allowed with 3 axis rotation. It says powered by Autodesk and the software reminds me of using the Autodesk Maya program.

Below are some links to their YouTube videos describing the system.

500,000 Page View for Blog

Blogger.com, a web service that is part of Google, showed me a message today that my blog had passed over the half a million page view mark. For a fossil blog, that seems to be a pretty good accomplishment. Other metrics like the one I get from Google Analytics show a much lower number but I am not sure when I activated that service to track Internet activity. I do not think it can track if the viewer who does not have Javascript active so that makes the count smaller.

So I hope to keep plodding along posting fossil images and interesting geology information to the Internet using this blog.

Cheers!