Time for a quiz

In between grant writing fury, I thought I'd take a moment to post a picture of a very odd fossil, and see if anyone could correctly identify it.

Some hints: this is from my field area, so it is marine, from central California, and approximately 6 million years old, and it belongs to a vertebrate. Also, it is very incomplete, but there are several features that distinguish it. So - now it is your job (if you so wish) to figure out what it is. And yes, '20 questions' is okay-ish.

Only one rule: folks who have already seen this can't give it away.

Good Luck!

California Academy of Sciences

NOTE: I have no idea why the formatting is all messed up. It is literally a pain in the rectum to get it to work correctly, and this is my sixth or seventh time trying to fix it... so screw it. I apologize for the inconvenience, but it probably bugs me more than any readers anyway. The width of the box I'm typing into and the final box is different, but I don't know why it adds a thousand spaces between the pictures.

I know its been a while since my last post, but last semester was so bad I needed that much time to recuperate. Pathetic, really. Anyway, earlier this year, my mom and I visited the new California Academy of Sciences, which opened early last fall. To say the least, it was absolutely spectacular. Unfortunately, the new CAS has almost nil when it comes to paleontology - sure, there's an unlabeled T. rex skeleton randomly thrown in the mix, and a bunch of artistic renderings of hominids with the date in Ma on one wall, and an elephant bird, but that doesn't really cut it, I'm afraid. The old CAS had an entire wing dedicated to fossil organisms, including a really neat mount of Dilophosaurus wetherilli in-situ. That is now probably hidden deep in the basement. Also, Parabalaenoptera baulinensis (which I think is mounted at LACM), which could have made an awesome exhibit, is nowhere to be found.

Anyway, enough moaning. Here are some photos, with minimal explanation (sorry). Since the formatting is all messed up, I've added numbers to the captions, so just count the pictures or something. If you're reading this, you're probably smart enough to figure it out.

1. Here's Claude, the albino alligator.

2.And here are some abalone (Haliotis).

3. Some sea urchins, and a rather cute hermit crab.

4.And some really awesome sea anemones.

5.A very cute star tortoise.

6.A bluntnose guitarfish (left), and a blacktip reef shark.

7.And here is the random, barely labeled T. rex. For all of you reading this still interested in dinosaurs, correct me if I'm wrong, but is this black beauty, from Canada? I know its not AMNH 5027, Wankel Rex, B-rex, Sue, Stan, or the 'type' Carnegie specimen. Other possibilities include the Denver Museum specimen, of course (or is that a mounted cast of AMNH 5027?).

8.And one of my favorite animals, Balaenoptera musculus, the blue whale. This skeleton has been at CAS over 100 years, and is 87' long (unless you include the rostrum, which appears to all be plaster).


9.Here's the living roof, which is pretty badass I must say. They generate electricity using this setup, and the soil adds insulation.

OH, and about this green technology stuff/progressive stuff at CAS. Thats all fine and stuff, but when you don't sell soda at your restaurant because its unhealthy for you, but offer beer and wine, and a full bar including mixed drinks, thats going a bit too far. Besides, I drink coke/pepsi because the caffeine helps stave off headaches, which I get very often. I'll pick my own goddamn poison, thank you very much.

10.And from the roof, is a view of the hideous and god-awful DeYoung art museum. It looks like a goddamend space ship. Or a prison. Or a prison space ship.

11.A skeleton of a subadult grey whale (Eschrichtius robustus). These are very strange whales, for a number of reasons. Okay, almost done.

12.Here are a very cute little bird (my girlfriend figured out what the hell it was called, but I can't remember) and a butterfly sharing some water. Moments later the butterfly attacked the bird (kind of). It really, really didn't want to share, and did a fairly impressive display, right in the bird's face. This was in a gigantic glass sphere which is basically a gigantor terrarium filled with gigantor fish, pretty birds, gigantor butterflies, reptiles, and amphibians.

13.And lastly, is a really purty and gigantor butterfly.

Thanksgiving Field Highlights

Ahh, this is why I love California. Especially my master's thesis field area. These are some tidepools exposed during a minus tide at sunset; Monterey Bay is the body of water to the left of the picture.

Yes... I'll use this to gloat about the election more. I'm happy the denizens of Capitola are happy about it to. You can actually see this paint job on photographs taken from aircraft:http://www.californiacoastline.org/cgi-bin/image.cgi?image=200810789&mode=big&lastmode=sequential&flags=9&year=current
Look at the base of the wall about midphoto, at the left end of the long lawn in the middle of the picture. I love the sunglasses that were added.

Here were some very odd linear features in the wavecut platform, which is an exposure of the Purisima Formation. Linear features such as this have been documented before in a similarly aged sedimentary unit of similar composition, the St. George Formation of Crescent City, in northernmost California. However, there the features were attributed to tsunami scouring by the transport of large boulders up and down the beach, in a direction normal to the shoreline. That is a north facing coast at Crescent City, and was susceptible to tsunamis from earthquakes in Alaska. However, this shoreline at Capitola, CA, faces south; what caused these features will likely remain an enigma.


Here is an atlas vertebra of a small mysticete whale preserved in the Purisima Formation. The atlas is somewhat similar to Piscobalaena and Herpetocetus, and likely belongs to the latter or a similar whale.

I have successfully navigated, conquered, and left the seventh level of hell

As in my first semester of graduate school, which was pretty damn tough, but a challenge nonetheless. In any event, finals are over, and my first real break from it has started... I... don't know what to do with all my free time! Its amazing... Anyway, expect more activity on here than what has been recently.

Happy finals!

Turkey Day!!!

Well, I'm about to leave for Thanksgiving week, and in a few minutes I'll be driving to the sprawling, gigantic Gallatin Field airport here in Bozeman (or should I say Belgrade). Anyway, it only has four gates, and can't service anything larger than a 737 (which it only does during the holidays).

I am super excited, mainly to see my family (who I haven't seen in several months), but also because of fieldwork - I have checked aerial photos, and there has been a LOT of coastal erosion, and it will only get worse (or in my case, better) between now and winter break.

You see, most paleontologists (here at MSU anyway) only get to their field areas in the summer, because its usually too damn cold to do so in the winter (although with a few Miocene land mammal spots around Bozeman, we've gone out in 20 degree weather before, and done jackets in 35 degree weather, with snow on the ground - we were really, really bored.... yeah...).

However, in California, it rarely dips below 45 degrees on the coast (and sometimes rarely above 55 in the winter), so it is possible to go out during this time of the year. However, in the winter, it is not only possible, it is usually far more productive as well. This is due to increased storm activity during the winter, and the increased chance of having cliff collapses (which really suck for the landowners above, who usually have pieces of their backyard now fifty feet lower, but is really good for me!). Also, during the summer the lack of extremely high tides and storms usually allows the cliffs to collect all sorts of dust, grime, and algae - storms during the winter usually clean off all this unsightly garbage, so that you can see clean, unweathered rock surfaces. I cannot begin to explain how much easier and more productive it makes collecting.

It also allows for the researcher to actually see sedimentary structures, and the detail of trace fossils (e.g. spreiten). Anyway, I have a good feeling about thanksgiving break, and a good feeling about winter break this year. Although I have no idea how I can top last winter break - a 40% complete fur seal skeleton (with partial skull), two partial odontocete skulls (one with partial skeleton, and a partial dentary), a 6" long Carcharocles megalodon tooth (aka bigass shark tooth), and a bunch of pinniped bones, bird bones, and shark teeth as icing on the cake.

I'll try to top that. I know I have at least one dolphin skull to excavate. Wish me luck, and Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Fun with volcanic tephra and invertebrates

One of the most useful sources of data with regards to dating a marine deposit are layers of volcanic ash or tephra. Often these can be dated directly, or chemically fingerprinted and matched to a parent body of igneous rock.

In the case of the Purisima Formation, some portions of it have more ash layers than others; Chuck Powell at the Menlo Park USGS tells me the section where this photo was taken has 13 different ash beds.

This ash bed in particular has been correlated with the Putah Tuff Member of the Tehama and Tuscan Formations of Northern California. The Putah Tuff is approximately 3.4 +/- 0.1 Ma, based on radiometric dating.

The problem with finding and utilizing tephra in the first place for dating or for tephrochronology of course is whether or not it gets preserved in the rock record. Ash forms before an eruption as bubbles form near the opening of a volcanic vent during the release of gas prior to an eruption; the magma that forms the material surrounding the gas cools and mineralizes. This mineralized material forming minute walls between gas bubbles then fragments as the eruption continues, and due to the small size (ash is classified by igneous petrologists and volcanologists as being >2mm) these fragments are then carried into the atmosphere via a 'current' of heated air before and during the eruption. Ash can stay in the atmosphere for long periods of time, and can even travel around the globe. Ash beds chemically identical to Yellowstone's Huckleberry Ridge Tuff (2.2 Ma) have been discovered in deep sea cores from the Northeastern Pacific Ocean. Since ash blows with the prevailing wind direction, and the prevailing winds in North America are westerlies, the ash apparently traveled around the earth (if anyone, e.g. Jeanette, has a reference for circumglobal ash deposition, let me know).

Typically, quieter ocean waters preserve ash better, as the ash needs to fall to the ocean surface, and settle to the sediment-water interface. High energy environments on the continental shelf rework sediment too rapidly to preserve discrete ash beds. However, there is also problem with depositing ash below storm- and fair-weather wave base: bioturbation.

Ah, those pesky critters geologists never like to pay much attention to - you know, animals. Well, in this case, geologists will probably like them even less. The problem is that below storm- and fair-weather wave base, bioturbation is insane - in some cases, like in the Purisima Formation, bioturbators effectively completely homogenize the sediment; I would estimate (based on ichnofabric index) that the sediments in these strata have bioturbated over 95% of the sediment, at least as preserved in a 6 km section of cliffs, which are 100-250' high; I'm too lazy to do the math, but that is a real shit load of sediment to churn through - and thats just in 2D - I don't even want to imagine what the actual volume of bioturbated sediment would be.

In the photograph I've posted (finally), you can see the Putah Tuff correlative ash bed. However, there's a twist - below the bed are the trace fossil Ophiomorpha nodosa, which invade sediments below the ash bed (Blue Arrow). These burrows are infilled with ash, and appear white on a brownish sandstone background. More Ophiomorpha nodosa invade the top of the ash bed, but are infilled with brownish sand(Red Arrow); again, there is beautiful contrast here with the brown filled burrows invading white ash.

In any event, those dastardly crustaceans weren't crafty enough to completely bioturbate the ash bed; the ash deposit was most likely too thick to be completely reworked. In all likelihood there is some sort of a preservational cutoff of ash thickness, although this would scale to the effectiveness of the bioturbating regime to homogenize sediment.

Fortunately, ichnofossils are extremely useful for paleoenvironmental reconstructions, so at least there is some information for geologists - not just a bunch of damn invertebrates destroying perfectly good sedimentary structures and ash layers.

P.s. I think I have a much better photo exemplifying this neat sand/ash contrast on a bioturbated contact; if I find it, I will post that as well).

Challenging Field Localities Part I

So, I'm going to start a series of posts on this site, which will be posted periodically. This post series will concentrate on challenging and technical fossil localities which I've dealt with - in the future, I might post about odd challenges others have faced in the field.

So, for the first post, I'll begin with more or less a conclusion/addition to the last post - how the hell my friend Tim got up there, why he went up there, and why I unfortunately followed.

The above photo is a mosaic of four or five pictures I took and later merged in photostitch. You can see a sort of a ramp on the left side, and a spot with some recognizable footprints. The spot with the footprints is the location of a 6-8" wide ledge, with an overhang underneath; at the time I weighed a few more pounds than Tim, even without any field gear besides my rock hammer (which I later tossed down to the beach so I didn't have to mess with it on my slow descent).

The second photo (at left) shows why we went up there in the first place - there is, in the upper right portion of the photo, a concave upward feature, which is about as long as Tim is tall (~6 feet). That is a mysticete whale mandible, and it is in a bonebed; pieces of bones from this bed had 'rained' down onto a 5' wide bench from this bonebed. To the right, the bed dips, and about 200' north intersects with the beach, and is accessible without a 20+' climb up a precarious, dusty, crumbling cliff. If I had my own rock climbing gear, it would be really awesome to rappel down to this bonebed.