The rush of Amazon geology, and stingrays

One of a series of blog posts written during the Field Museum's 2010 Yaguas rapid inventory of Yaguas, Peru, and published by the New York Times.

"Bob Stallard is the geologist on the expedition, and I’m just going to go ahead and say it: He looks an awful lot like Eric Clapton. Like Clapton, Bob has been doing great work for decades and is highly regarded in his field. But where Clapton tends toward songs like “Hellhound on My Trail,” Bob’s songbook runs more along the lines of, say, “Quartz Pebbles Probably Dating to a Miocene Deposition Event on My Trail.” The surface geology of northern Peru is extremely complex, and it’s a lot easier for biologists to interpret what we see on the landscape when we’re accompanied by a whip-smart geologist. Having along a whip-smart geologist who looks like he could have played the Isle of Wight in his younger days makes it all the more fun...."

Read the whole post here.

Photo by Álvaro del Campo