The Spanish province of La Rioja is an area of the world where a huge number of dinosaur footprints have been found, with many more likely yet to be discovered. This hilly region has many rock slopes with layers so full of tracks that, if the vegetation, loose rock, and debris could be removed, would yield from 8000 to as many as 25,000 footprints. Using the best estimates from some slopes – that is, the maximum estimate from that partial data – there may be as many as 70,000 footprints.

Drilling operations are a significant cost in the process of recovering hydrocarbons. The operations are advanced and associated with large HSE and financial risks. The main objectives in a successful drilling operation are to construct safe and economically efficient wells, but the success also depends on hitting the target. As the drilling operation has very high standards of execution, a good drilling operation depends on a good well plan.

The planning phase is a large and complex process as it engineers all aspects of a drilling operation. This is key to create safe and economically efficient wells. Well trajectory planning is a mixture of many parameters but in the end it comes down to identifying the most optimum well path. That means they should be based on exact mathematical calculation models, to precisely calculate well bore trajectories. The industry uses a number of different planning tools that makes it possible to calculate and plan complex well path trajectories. Very few studies have addressed this topic in a systematic manner. 

F.ishes have a unique evolutionary" history that stretches back in time more than 450 million yrears. They are incredibly ancient, older than the dinosaurs, and include the ancestors of all the limbed vertebrates living on land, even humans. Human evolution is rooted in fishes; and scientists have discovered traces of 360-million-ycar-old fossils of transitional aquatic creatures that had both gills and limbs.

The Bergell Alps offer not only a magnificent landscape with impressive mountains that attract many tourists, but also they document a unique geological history, first explored by Bernhard Studer (1851) and since then studied and documented in many publications. In this book, we try to connect visitors with scientific curiosity with remarkable geological features observed in the Bergell Alps, such as a young granite that intrudes into an older stack of nappes (thrust sheets) that represent the European continental plate at the base overthrust by the African plate, causing gradients in temperature and pressure that can be explored by looking at outcrops of rocks in the field.