UCMP’s summer adventures (cont.)(page 2 of 7) |
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Tony Barnosky crawled around in poison oak to find Pleistocene mammal sites
in Shasta County, CA. He relocated some particularly productive cave sites
that had been excavated nearly 100 years ago and which merit analysis using
modern techniques. Later in the summer, he traveled to Florence, Italy to
present a paper (coauthored by graduate students Edward Davis and Mark
Carrasco) at a Paleobiodiversity Symposium at the 32nd International
Geological Congress. Marc Carrasco
diligently entered MIOMAP data all summer, and through his
efforts combined with those of Edward Davis, Brian Kraatz, and John Deck of
the Berkeley Natural History Museums, the MIOMAP
database is now online for beta testing. The MIOMAP project uses a
Geographic Information System (GIS) for mapping and analyzing spatial and
temporal information about Miocene mammal taxa and localities for the
western United States.Bill Clemens
was back in Montana… again. One would think that all the
significant fossils had been collected by now, but wind and rain work in our
favor. Each year new material appears in the badlands, so Bill headed back
to northeastern Montana where he joined Harley and Mary Garbani. Together
they continued collecting at an early Paleocene site discovered a couple of
years ago. Unlike other fossil localities of similar age, where the fossils are
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preserved in a jumble of lignite and silts, the new site preserves
fossils in a relatively clean, sandy matrix, probably formed as a sand bar
in a river. Its attraction is the more frequent occurrence of fragments of
mammalian skulls and jaws, as well as wrist and ankle bones. These fossils
are adding to our knowledge of mammals that lived after the extinction of
the non-avian dinosaurs.Edward Davis
and Samantha Hopkins visited the American Museum of Natural
History in New York during the summer. While Sam looked at a number of
specimens of early rodents (aplodontids), Edward measured ~250 ankle bones,
or astragali, from Miocene camels and pronghorns. He also hunted around the
museum for all of the specimens from the Panaca fauna of Miocene Nevada, as
part of his dissertation work.
 Three of the astragali examined by Edward Davis at the AMNH in New York. (photos by Edward Davis)
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