UCMP’s summer adventures (cont.)(page 4 of 7) |
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Brian Kraatz had a busy summer traveling to both Mongolia and China.
In Mongolia he conducted fieldwork in the Valley of the Lakes area related
to his dissertation. The Central Asiatic Expedition of the American Museum
of Natural history first visited this area for paleontological exploration
in the 1920s. Since that time numerous expeditions have collected from its
extremely fossiliferous deposits. These fossils mark a time that follows a
large faunal turnover, when small mammal (rodents and rabbits) assemblages
were dominating many of the world’s mammalian faunas. The purpose of the
trip was to visit fossil localities that were worked by the joint
Mongolian-American expeditions throughout the 1990s to collect rock samples
that will then be dated using paleomagnetic techniques. The work was
completed with help from Dr. Badamgarav from the Mongolian Academy of
Sciences and Faysal Bibi, one-time Cal undergrad, now at Yale. On the return
from Mongolia, Brian stayed in Beijing for two weeks to present
a paper at the International Congress of Zoology and study fossil |
Brian Kraatz makes an entry in his field notebook in Mongolia.
collections at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. Everything was a complete success. Being on
sabbatical, Kevin Padian started his “summer” early—in April, to be
exact, when he joined a crew of French and Moroccan colleagues for three weeks
of reconnaissance and excavation in the Jurassic of Morocco. “The Atlas
Mountains are indescribable—like jamming Utah and Arizona into an area half
the size of California. We had a terrific time and were quite hospitably
welcomed by the people there. And we collected a ton of Early Jurassic sauropod
bones.”
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