Are these what you get if you give the Aliens from Sesame Street a haircut?
How do geology and Sesame Street go together? Not sure? I'll tell you. Many of you would have heard of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event which occurred roughly 55 million years ago, but did you know that it wasn't one simple event? Geologists have now realised that it was a series of carbon excursions (released from methane thawing out from the sea-floor). One of these is marked by a layer of red clay and as the mascot of the drilling vessel undertaking the research was "Elmo" from sesame street, the geologists aboard decided to call it the "Elmo Event". This caused a major uproar among traditional scientists who insisted that ELMO must stand for something, so the original researchers decided to call the red clay layer "Eocene Layer Of Mysterious Origin" You can read more about the PETM and the ELMO event at the links below: http://bit.ly/LmsL1y http://bit.ly/LVPQLd -LL