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For Bob Gregory, chair of the Department of Geological Sciences, 2002 marked the 25th anniversary of his field work in the Arabian peninsula. His most recent work has been in the Oman Mountains, a 400-mile-long mountain range that stretches from the Straits of Hormuz along the Gulf of Oman to the Indian Ocean. What makes this mountain range unique is that it has the world's best example of ancient oceanic crust and mantle exposed on land – rocks known as ophiolites. "We are trying to get insights into why the ophiolite is located on the top of these mountains," Gregory says. "It's the odd event in Earth history."

Paleontology graduate student Pete Rose took this photo while on a dinosaur fossil-hunting expedition last summer on Alaska’s North Slope. Rose and Kent Newman (shown here along with Aaron Hawkins from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks) were among the members of a team that went to Alaska to look for bones from a horned dinosaur known as a ceratopsian. Ceratopsian had some of the largest skulls of any dinosaur known – as much as six feet long. “When we got there, we started turning up bones left and right,” Rose says. “We found portions of at least eight different skulls.” The initial attempt to lift this skull out by helicopter failed, but a team that included several members of the U.S. Army’s Mt. McKinley high-altitude rescue division was finally able to help the researchers get the fossil to the University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks, where it will remain for further study.