Labels!

I'm starting a small series within this blog of labels. It'll just be a photograph of a label and whose label it is. At some point I'll write more about the individuals behind these labels, but right now I just want to get some of these online.
* all scales in the photographs are in cm.

Burgess Shale

The Burgess Shale is an amazing deposit. Since its discovery at the turn of the last century, it has been our window into an amazing explosion of life during the Late Cambrian. Organisms living in the equatorial waters of what is now British Columbia were periodically buried in mud-rich blankets of sediment coming off the nearby reef (the Cathedral Escarpment). Anoxic conditions and rapid burial led to the preservation of soft parts.

My personal favorite critter from the Burgess is Wiwaxia. How can  you not love a creature that looks like a pinecone with spikes coming out of its back? Debate continues as to where this creature can be classified. It has been variously assigned to Annelida, Mollusca, and Ecdysozoa (see Eibye-Jacobsen, 2004 for a discussion of Wiwaxia's phylogenetic position).

Wiwaxia (scale in mm) Peabody Museum of Natural History

To aid in visualizing this critter in life, here's a recreation from the Smithsonian's site:

And Wiwaxia is just one of the many strange and wonderful creatures who inhabited the seas at this point in our world's history.  Check out the Smithsonian's site (A Burgess Shale Sampler) for more amazing organisms.

The Burgess Shale was made a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1981. In 1990 it was featured in Stephen Jay Gould's "Wonderful Life." National Geographic made a movie about it. It has its own website: Burgess Shale Geoscience Foundation. It has its own toys (available through the Royal Ontario Museum). It even had its own beer, but geologists being what they are, the stock quickly ran out. This kind of broad acclaim is generally reserved for dinosaurs and their ilk, but it simply shows how amazing and interesting the Burgess Shale is.

Eibye-Jacobsen, D. 2004. "A reevaluation of Wiwaxia and the polychaetes of the Burgess Shale." Lethaia. vol. 37, no. 3. pp. 317-335.

Lagerstätte

Ask any invertebrate paleontologist about lagerstätte, and chances are they'll bandy about the same few names: Burgess Shale, Hunsruck, and Solnhofen. Find yourself a paleoentomologist, and you might get a slightly different answer: Florissant, Elmo, Green River. A crinoid worker might add Crawfordsville. The point is that out of all of the rocks deposited all over the world there aren't many lagerstätte. The snapshot these deposits provide is immensely valuable to paleontologists in terms of diversity and paleoecology. To celebrate these deposits, I will discuss many lagerstätte in some detail over the coming weeks.

Burgess Shale creatures live on!

I apologize for my recent absence - I am now a mom!

Back to Spineless things... I am currently working on unwrapping a series of fossils collected in Morocco. You may have seen some of these featured on the cover of Nature or in the New York Times. Ever specimen I unwrap is somehow new and exciting; it's like Christmas in March! All kinds of new research is being done with these specimens, but one aspect that I find especially important is the value of these lagerstätte. Now you may be asking yourself, lager-what? A lagerstätten is (as used by us paleontologists) a deposit of extraordinary preservation. Think of the Solnhofen Limestone in Germany where Archaeopteryx is preserved or the insects of Florissant National Monument. These types of deposits preserve fine details that are ordinarily lost in the fossil record. Whether they are impressions of feathers or cell outlines in a dragonfly's wing, these deposits are invaluable to paleontologists.

A fly from the Florissant beds. See more insects here.

Check back later in the week for more about lagerstätte, Morocco and the Burgess Shale!

Paleo-Knowledge Bowl

How do you get kids excited about science and involve them even more in current research and museum activities? A Paleo-Knowledge Bowl! Here at the Peabody, our fabulous public education and outreach program has held such an event for the last thirteen years. Kids from 4th-6th grades form teams of three. After brushing up on general paleontology trivia (always a valuable skill) and learning the year's latest paleo-news, these teams descend on the Peabody Museum for an all-day event which culminates in a final round held underneath our dinosaurs in the Great Hall. You can learn more about our event (or register a team) here.
Even smaller-scale versions of an event like this can be a great learning experience for students of any age. This is the time to let your paleo-geekiness shine through!

Happy National Fossil Day!

I love holidays in general, but this one has to hold a special place. It's National Fossil Day! The National Park Service has decided that today, October 13, 2010, will be our country's first annual holiday to celebrate our prehistoric past. They even made a song and a video. They held an art contest (you can see the winners here). The drawing here is my favorite of the batch - drawn by an 8 year old named Lily from Gettysburg, PA.

 

I am one of those scientists who studies animals that are dead (although mine are all invertebrates). 

This day really helps to highlight the importance of preserving our planet's past. Museums around the country are hosting special activities today. If you're in the New Haven area, check out the Yale Peabody Museum. We've got all kinds of special activities planned that you can find out about here. If you live somewhere else, check out your local museum to see if they've got any special plans to celebrate today!

And just so you know, my love of paleontology began with rugose corals. How about you? What's your favorite fossil?

Fossil Cycad National Monument

I consider myself fairly well-versed in the National Parks and Monuments of this country, but I'll admit this was one I'd never heard of before. A bit of research led me to write this post both about the history of this forgotten Monument. This commemorative image for the Fossil Cycad National Monument comes from the NPS website.

The story of this monument begins with the discovery of fossilized cycadeoids in 1892 by F. H. Cole. He sent photographs to Henry Newton, a geologist at the Smithsonian. Interest in the site began to pick up among paleobotanists. Ultimately, George Wieland (a paleobotanist from Yale University) secured the land under the Homestead Act "in order that the cycads might not fall into unworthy hands" (Hot Springs Weekly Star, 1938). I'll return to this particular statement later in the post.

Two years later, Wieland turned the land over to the government so that the land could become a National Monument. President Harding signed the Fossil Cycad National Monument into being on October 21, 1922. Not much was done to develop the site for the next decade. In 1935 Wieland supervised a group of CCC workers who excavated a number of test pits. Over a ton of uneroded cycadeoid specimens were removed during these excavations. Wieland was keen on developing this site as an in situ site for the public to see fossils. In a 1937 Science discussion Wieland writes, "Fossil Cycad Monument more than all others of its series is as we now see dependent on an absolutely in situ development and display. Without this it can mean but little, as a mere blurred shadow, all but lost again in the shuffle of time." However, accusations were made against Wieland that he removed all surficial cycadeoid specimens prior to turning the land over to the federal government. Also, that all cycadeoid specimens that had been unearthed ended up in museum collections including the Smithsonian and the Peabody. By 1956 no cycadeoids could be found at the surface anywhere in the 320 acre Monument. The Monument was abolished on September 1, 1957, and on December 6, 1957 the land was turned over to the BLM.

The story of this National Monument has a couple of important lessons for us. First, many areas of our country hold specimens from the planet's history, and without our stewardship they will never be protected. Second, if a particular parcel of land does not have some kind of impressive scenery or value to wildlife, then its desirability is limited. A visitor center describing a fossil forest buried under the ground is not nearly as impressive as a visitor center located near an exposed fossil forest. As Harry Slattery, personal assistant to Secretary of the Interior Ickes wrote in 1937, "It is realized that the area is of outstanding paleobotanical interest . But it is also realized that the subject of fossil cycads does not have a broad appeal and, therefore, extensive development of the monument would benefit only a limited group of people. This is particularly true since the area does not possess other outstanding attractions. The scenery is neither impressive nor is it unusual; the geological interest, other than its paleobotanic relations, is not phenomenal; the area is too small for wildlife preservation; the terrain does not lend itself well to recreational development, and there is little historic interest."

A more in depth history can be found here.