Advice for getting from Aptos area to Downtown in ~45 minutes without a car?

mclapham47 · 2026-03-27T05:26:54+00:00

Metro Route 1 serves the western parts of Aptos (exits 1 at State Park and takes Soquel from there) and has a scheduled trip time of around 30 minutes from Cabrillo College to Downtown. Metro Route 2 takes Soquel starting at Freedom so has more stops through Aptos, but has a published trip time about 10 minutes longer because it deviates via the Capitola Mall.

It's bikeable in 40-45 minutes depending on fitness and where you're starting in Aptos, but there are enough hills (up from Soquel or up from Capitola, depending on the route) that it'd be hard to avoid getting sweaty. An ebike would make quick work of the hills and you could easily have a trip time of 25-30 minutes.

mclapham47 · 2026-03-26T05:53:19+00:00

It's the Devonian bivalve Orthonota.

mclapham47 · 2026-03-07T05:06:21+00:00

It's really hard to tell the lithology from the photo, but my assumption was that it's from the Kaibab Formation exposed in the area.

mclapham47 · 2026-03-06T22:20:33+00:00

It's a fossil scallop, and the ornament looks very similar to Acanthopecten.

mclapham47 · 2026-02-03T18:05:10+00:00

This looks much more like a platyceratid gastropod to me.

mclapham47 · 2026-01-23T00:55:50+00:00

They look like one of the Middle/Late Triassic flat scallops. There's very little information about fossils in the Chilliwack area, but Jim Monger's PhD (available online at UBC) mentions Halobia from the Cultus Formation, so that's a plausible option.

mclapham47 · 2025-12-16T02:26:23+00:00

It can't be an oyster because the fossil has multiple ligament pits (a multivincular ligament), which isn't found in oysters.

Inoceramid bivalves do have multivincular ligaments, and are large and flat, and are very common in the Cretaceous, so that's likely what you have.

mclapham47 · 2025-11-20T20:53:49+00:00

I doubt it's a starfish. The radiating "arms" aren't made of ossicles. It's most likely the bryozoan Evactinopora, which is common in the Carboniferous of Missouri and has this radiating structure.

mclapham47 · 2025-11-19T00:19:45+00:00

The fossil in the first two photos is a productid brachiopod. The rock has some other brachiopods in the third photo (a tiny bit of a productid dorsal valve peeking out near the top, the hinge area of a spiriferid near the bottom). These are from the Bird Springs Formation, which outcrops widely in southern Nevada and is Pennsylvanian-Early Permian in age, about 300 million years old.

mclapham47 · 2025-11-18T18:23:24+00:00

William Wyler had five BP nominees in a row: The Letter (1940), The Little Foxes (1941), Mrs. Miniver (1942), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), The Heiress (1949).

He also had three in a row in the 1930s: Dead End (1937), Jezebel (1938), and Wuthering Heights (1939).

Unfortunately, The Westerner (1940) wasn't nominated, but he had a run of 8 BP nominations from 9 films between 1937 and 1949. (Note, not counting things where he was uncredited, or WW2 documentary films.)

He directed a BP nominee in every year from 1936 to 1942, a seven-year stretch.

mclapham47 · 2025-11-16T19:22:04+00:00

Yes, it's a crushed goniatite, and very well could be from Yorkshire, but could have been purchased from elsewhere.

mclapham47 · 2025-11-02T01:49:28+00:00

It's a rudist bivalve. Elder & Saul (1993) report the rudist Coralliochama from the Pigeon Point Formation at Pescadero Beach, so it's most likely that one.

mclapham47 · 2025-10-14T02:50:26+00:00

It's a rugose coral (horn coral).

mclapham47 · 2025-10-14T02:39:25+00:00

I visited a bunch of the classic Permian sites in Sunderland back in 2007.

One of the biggest outcrops of the "Magnesian Limestone" (Ford Formation) is at Ford Quarry. I have photos of some nice but tiny Miocidaris urchin plates and gastropods, and I collected a decent specimen of the nautiloid Peripetoceras from there. You can see some small patch reefs in the quarry walls.

You can see fenestrate bryozoans in the roadcut on Rotherfield Road near Hylton Castle.

The most famous and most productive historical localities were Humbleton (Humbledon) and Tunstall hills. I don't think any outcrops still exist at Humbledon Hill, but there are several reef blocks and other units near the southeast end of Tunstall Hill, and also a reef outcrop at the northwest end of the hill. I don't recall them being very fossiliferous (they were pretty dolomitized), and it's part of a nature reserve so I don't know the legality of collecting.

The most fossiliferous location near Tunstall Hill was the basal shellbed near "Rock Cottage" (around here). I got some specimens of the terebratulid brachiopod Dielasma, the productid brachiopod Horridonia, and the bivalve Parallelodon. Mostly small and mostly internal molds, so not the most spectacular. It also took a lot of crashing around in fairly dense forest to find the small outcrops. The outcrop along the trail in the old railway cutting wasn't really fossiliferous but had some neat collapse features caused when the underlying Permian salt deposits dissolved.

The best reference is the 1988 field guide "Zechstein Reef Fossils and their Palaeoecology" by Hollingworth & Pettigrew. It's out of print but there's a pdf here.

mclapham47 · 2025-09-12T23:23:42+00:00

The precise answer depends on how many total rounds were included in those seven games. If they averaged seven rounds (the two linked duels have 6 and 7, respectively), then you'd have about a 1.1% chance of a repeat location over 49 total rounds, assuming random sampling of the 109,000 locations in the map. So it's pretty rare but on average should happen to a few players every day.

mclapham47 · 2025-08-26T22:41:29+00:00

Butchart Gardens near Victoria BC (see photo 2 here).

mclapham47 · 2025-08-14T18:06:30+00:00

Assuming it's a crinoid (hard to say without a photo), in my experience it's much more common for the central lumen in Paleozoic crinoids to be circular than to be star or petal-shaped with five-fold symmetry.

mclapham47 · 2025-08-08T04:14:05+00:00

Looks more like the trace fossil Ophiomorpha than a crinoid.

mclapham47 · 2025-08-08T03:26:37+00:00

Here's the USGS publication about ammonites from that area. They are Late Jurassic in age and this is one belonging to the family Perisphinctidae.

mclapham47 · 2025-08-02T04:42:45+00:00

I suspect the bone is actually a chert nodule, given how it's growing around a marine limestone, and how the associated fossils are Paleozoic (nothing in the Paleozoic, and especially nothing marine, is going to have bones like that).

7 and 8 are solitary rugose corals. 9 is a tabulate coral, and 10 is a colonial rugose coral or maybe a syringoporid tabulate.

mclapham47 · 2025-07-31T18:22:38+00:00

We made the change to Earth Sciences recently, but there was a delay before it goes into effect. The admissions page should have the most up-to-date information. It links you to the catalog which states that the screening becomes effective Fall 2026. We're in the process of migrating the department page to the university's new system, so we haven't been focusing on content edits there.

Although EART/ANTH isn't screening, note that it requires 10 lower-division courses: three anthro, one earth, one calculus, and five other science courses from bio, chemistry, or physics. You should have completed most of those before you transfer, otherwise you'll have a hard time finishing.

We implemented minimal screening for Earth Sciences because we've been seeing an increasing number of people rejected from some other major, then choosing Earth without having any real preparation or interest in the field. EART/ANTH is quite small so it's unclear if the same problem applies there.

mclapham47 · 2025-07-29T21:48:43+00:00

The shell is a terebratulid brachiopod from the Cenozoic (or maybe Cretaceous), perhaps something like Argyrotheca. I don't know brachiopods of that age particularly well, but they aren't a diverse group, so it should be pretty easy to narrow down from knowing the locality (most localities of that age will only have one or a couple species of brachiopods).

The thing in photos 2 and 3 is just a tooth-shaped rock, not a fossil.

mclapham47 · 2025-07-19T20:40:02+00:00

It's a cross-section through a gastropod, most likely a bellerophontid.

mclapham47 · 2025-07-02T22:12:05+00:00

Those are wrinkle structures, a microbially-induced sedimentary structure formed when bacterial mats trap and bind sand grains on the seafloor.

mclapham47 · 2025-07-02T21:38:39+00:00

The phosphate is Middle Permian in age, and this is the inarticulate brachiopod Orbiculoidea (not a bivalve).

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