Ancient Colors in the Valley

Walking outdoors in the St. Croix Valley under autumn trees I can't help but notice the colors. I'm talking, of course, about the colors of the rocks. Glaciers deposited layers of rocks and sand over the existing bedrock thousands of years ago and as a result we can even find every color of rock imaginable.

On a hike with the rest of the staff at the Lee & Rose Warner Nature Center this fall I kept my eyes open for a particular kind of rock. I wasn't finding my quarry but our naturalist intern Jen, also interested in geology, picked up a palm-sized rock and commented on its beauty. She had unknowingly found exactly what I was looking for. Red and black bands streaked across the irregular dirty surface. (see photo above, it is about 4 inches across.) It looked pretty unassuming but this is a rock with a spectacular history. I took a deep satisfying breath as I turned it over in my hands examining it closely. In a way, I had this rock to thank for the oxygen in that deep breath I took. Not only is it one of the oldest rocks on earth, about 2 billion years old, it's also a fossil.

The red stripes are form of chert called jasper and the black stripes are either hematite or magnetite. Stripes are often a sign of a sedimentary rock laid down slowly layer-by-layer. Residents of the St. Croix Valley are no strangers to sedimentary rock. The limestone that pokes out around the valley is sedimentary rock. As their name suggests these rocks are usually sediments compressed together into hard rock by time and pressure. This sedimentary rock is different though and not just because it is more than 1.5 billion years older than the limestone of the valley.

This rock is called a stromatolite and it is evidence of one of the earliest and oldest forms of life on earth. Billions of years ago, shallow seas harbored colonial cyanobacteria. Scientists think we have these cyanobacteria to thank for the formation of an oxygen rich atmosphere on Earth. When these creatures gave off oxygen from photosynthesis they helped change the atmosphere but some of the oxygen combined with dissolved iron in the water and these new iron oxides fell out to the bottom where they got stuck in the slimy coating of the cyanobacteria. Slowly, layer-by-layer, the mats of cyanobacteria got thicker and thicker forming banded layered stromatolites. The iron impurities in silica created the red bands of jasper and the silvery hematite is simply iron bound to oxygen, one of those iron oxides formed long ago. There are massive deposits of these iron rich rocks in northern Minnesota and we know those formations today as the Iron Range. The work of these tiny creatures billions of years ago helped us by creating not only the atmosphere that sustains us but also the iron in our cars, buildings and cookware.

Glaciers pushed this chunk of rock here from up north during the last ice age a mere 10,000 years ago. I ground and polished the rock we found that day until the red jasper glowed the color of blood (which is also red because of iron) and the hematite shined like polished aluminum. The reds of autumn have faded but the bands of red jasper in my hands will last for millions of years more and serve as a reminder of the beauty and complexity of our ancient planet.

~Kirk

Hadrosaur Mummy

This story is finally breaking in the mainstream press. I had the opportunity to visit the site this dinosaur was excavated from when I went on the dino dig this past summer with Marmarth Research Foundation. I'm looking forward to seeing the National Geographic program this week.

This one fossil has the potential to change a lot of what we think we know about dinosaurs.

I guess my toy Hypacrosaurus (a Hadrosaurid dinosaur) pictured above is fairly accurate with those stripes. Of course who knows what color they were. I personally think the teal spots are a bit much.

~Kirk

Cephelopod Fossil

I joked a few posts ago about bringing home a 10 foot long cephelopod fossil. Well, that has yet to happen. I did find a cephalopod fossil though. About a month ago I took some Girl Scouts to Lilydale Regional Park in St. Paul to look for Ordovician aged fossils. We found the usual suspects in the usual spots and after the group left I ate a quick lunch and headed back into the park to scope out some other sites. I've never had time to fully explore the site so I was looking forward to seeing if there were some other spots I could take groups. I also did a little more exploring in the stream bed and that's where I found this gem.










The kicker is that this is from a much much larger animal and the rest of it was nowhere to be found. It is either still in a hillside or more likely, broken into dozens of pieces and every piece has been found by a different person. Oh well, such is fossil hunting at this site. It is about as picked over as they come. It is still a really cool piece and I'm excited to have it in my collection.

~Kirk

Where's the Beef?

With all the posts about dinosaurs lately I thought this would be timely.

I recently happened upon one of the major creationist websites and read some of their mind-boggling "science." Creationists rail against evolution and complain that the fossil record is incomplete. They claim there are no transitional forms. They don't claim the transitional forms were not fossilized mind you, they claim they did not exist. The reason they claim they did not exist is that they do not appear in the fossil record and if they had existed they would have appeared.

Real scientists point out that the fossil record is incomplete because the creation of fossils is a sporadic event occurring over a long time period that requires specific conditions. Even given that, there are very few paleontologists and a LOT of ground to cover. Only a tiny fraction of the dinosaurs that are fossilized have been dug up and identified.

Creationists ignore this fact and prefer to believe that the fossil record was created by the great flood. Only animals that existed at the time of the flood could have been killed and buried and fossilized. Since we don't find transitional forms, they didn't exist.

Ahem, herein lies the rub for creationists. There are two huge logical problems with their argument.

First off, if the flood was the singular event that formed fossils and the flood only lasted one year then DUH there aren't any transitional forms because evolution doesn't happen in one year. You can't simultaneously say all the fossils were formed in one year and then claim evolution is false because the "snapshot" of animal life the flood fossilized in one year doesn't' show transitional forms. You can either have fossils being formed over millions of years and then you get to complain about missing transitional forms or you get fossils formed in one year by the great flood but then you can't complain about missing transitional forms. You can't logically have it both ways.

Choose one.

Secondly, Noah took two of each animal onto the ark right? Let's look at a fairly common animal. Deer. If he took two deer onto the ark that leaves, oh, let's say a few billion deer that didn't make it onto the ship. They died in the flood. So did all of the bears, goats, horses, chickens, wolves, kangaroos, squirrels, moose, cows, pigs, etc. that were not the lucky two chosen. The idea creationists but forward is that there are no dinosaurs now because they died in the flood. That is why we find them fossilized.

Hold on here a second.

Dear creationists, if Noah only took two of each animal onto the ark then there were millions of individuals from each species that DID NOT make it onto the ark and would have died in the flood. There are lots of dinosaurs that creationists and young earth believers think died in the flood. Please show me a fossil of a deer, a bear, a goat, a horse, a chicken, a wolf, a kangaroo, a moose, a cow or a pig.

Better yet show me hundreds of millions of them because hundreds of millions would not have made it onto the ark and they would have died right alongside the dinosaurs. They don't show up in the fossil record and you claim that animals that don't show up in the fossil record don't exist. That's weird because I could swear I've seen cows, bears, goats, horses, etc. yet they aren't in the fossil record with the dinosaurs.

You can't have it both ways.

Come to think of it where are the fossils of the millions of people who died in the flood? Why don't we find axes and houses and ox-carts and humans and dogs and sandals and cooking utensils mixed in with dinosaur fossils?

Bah! It isn't worth wasting more time on it. We don't find these things because the world wasn't formed the way some guys with no scientific understanding sitting in a tent thousands of years ago dreamed it was created. If you are a creationist and you read this please explain why when a transitional form can't be found it means the scientists are wrong but it is all hunky dory when creationists can't find a single fossil cow, pig, etc. when there should be millions.

~Kirk

Dinosaur Dig (part 4)

Ah, Thursday and Friday. We're almost at the end of our journey. I'm not posting anything about Friday as it was just our drive home.

After our rain day Wednesday we were itching to get back out in the field on Thursday.

We had a fantastic day. I drank over four liters of water in the field and I was still thirsty. I can see how if you were to run out of water out there it could be bad very quickly. It wasn't even that hot. The week before we arrived they were having temperatures in the 100s.

The arrow on the left shows the view of our van from where we ate lunch Thursday. That white splotch is an 18 foot long 15 passenger van.

Here's the same photo uncropped for comparison. We hiked though this basin and stopped atop this butte for lunch. The spot we're sitting in is relatively flat as they removed a triceratops from this site a few years ago. There were some bone scraps left behind and little pieces of plaster from making a field jacket for the beast. Can you imagine carrying the dinosaur back to where the van is in this photo?

I sometimes read complaints that the fossil record in incomplete. This sometimes comes from those who oppose the theory of evolution. They argue that there has been plenty of time for scientists to find all the fossils they need and transitional forms have not been found.

Have these people ever gone on a dig? The dinosaurs are embedded in hard rock. First you have to find one, then you have to have the time and resources to spend a year or more getting it out of the ground. This often involves taking off layers of stone many feet thick, one exacto blade scrape at a time. Imagine scraping away a whole hillside of hard rock with a dull exacto blade in blazing heat and humidity. Once you finally uncover the dinosaur you have to make a plaster field jacket and then transport it back to a lab (which in some cases means building new roads just to reach the site) It doesn't end there, you have to spend possibly years cleaning and assembling it. Once you see the vastness on an area like this and then realize there are essentially two or three people with a shoestring budget trying to find the treasures that have been battered by erosion and covered over for 65 million years and you begin to see how it may take some time to fill in our gaps in understanding. This is still a very young science and there are many millions of critters still waiting to be dug up.

Thursday was all about microsites. That means we spent a good part of the day sitting on the ground moving painstakingly forward looking for teeth and small limb bones. At the third site of the day I found two dromeosaur teeth but stupidly didn't take a picture. This particular site was still of scientific interest so we couldn't keep anything. It was similar to the teeth pictured here.

In the photo to the left we're heading home for dinner on Thursday. You can click on it (or any photo on the blog) to view a bigger image. The barbed wire fence on the left hand side of the picture marks the border with Montana. I could have spent many more hours in the field I was having so much fun. I inhaled a huge dinner of nachos and encheladas after the hour and thirty minute van trip back to Marmarth. I was very excited to not have hot dish.

I had a great time on the trip and I can't wait to return. I'll have to though. With a baby due soon I won't be able to sneak away for a week to look for dinosaurs next summer. We need to line up some funding as well. In the mean time I'll have to content myself hunting down an relatively complete ordavercian period cephalopod along the banks of the Mississippi or perhaps a complete crinoid. That should keep me busy. Chelsey will be less than thrilled if I do manage to find and bring home a six foot long cephalopod fossil. "Where do you intend to keep that?!"

Well, that's all for now. I'm sure the trip will generate a few more posts.

~Kirk

Dinosaur Dig (part 2)

Here's post number 2 about my dinosaur hunting trip. I present, Tuesday.

Tuesday we headed out to the Triceratops site. This was very neat to see, though a bit confusing as the skeleton was not complete. I know what a sacrum and ilium are but I'm guessing the kids didn't. I would include a photo but unless you know what you are looking at it just looks like a shot of the ground.

The previous day, a group had made a plaster field jacket for the triceratops femur so we helped haul that out. It was very heavy. That's me on the back right getting ready to lower it down a small hill. I think the dark blotch on the horizon might be the truck we're carrying it to. The field jacket consists of a 2x4 for support, some foil and a lot of plaster strips.



While waiting to carry out the femur I did a little prospecting and located a rich trail of bone fragments coming down the hillside maybe 100 feet from the triceratops. I called the rest of the group over and we followed the pieces up to the top of the hill where they stopped. We dug a little but didn't find anything. The two experts with us looked at some of the pieces we found and could tell that they were triceratops frill. It was really cool to follow the trail and start looking for more even though we didn't turn up anything. They hadn't found the head of the triceratops they were excavating 100 feet away so perhaps it disassociated when it died and we were finding pieces of the head of the one they were digging up. Who knows.

Here I am doing a little cleaning up on a different piece of frill. You can see the lines from where the blood vessels were. If you think that triceratops were cold blooded then you think the blood vessels were there to help heat up the dinosaurs via passive solar collection. If you think they were warm blooded then the blood vessels may have helped it cool down. I'll leave that debate to the experts.

FYI: The stylish latex gloves are actually to keep paint and chemicals off my hands as we were making plastic casts of dinosaur pieces on the table in the background.


Later that day we climbed to the top of a butte and felt one of the strongest winds I've ever felt in my life. I took this clip of video but it doesn't do the force of the wind justice. You can get a good view of the basin we are about to descend into as I pan across the landscape. This is my first ever video in a blog post. I'll have better ones in the future!

Click To Play

Atop this bluff we collected some of the K-T boundary. This is the geologic boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. This layer of ash comes from the meteorite impact that slammed into the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago and almost ended all life on earth. The actual K-T boundary here is very visible, one of the best spots on earth to see it. You can even see yellow ribbons of iridium in the black. Iridium in this concentration generally only comes from meteors.

For reference, check out this satellite photo.


View Larger Map
The marker marks the exact spot we collected the KT boundary. Can you see why they call this the Hell Creek formation? It isn't a real hospitable location. The basin to the south of the butte is where we spent the day hiking and looking for fossils.

We headed down into the basin and scouted out several cool sites. We found many pieces of turtle shell. Most pieces were about the size of a quarter.

The pieces I found are from trionychid turtles such as this one. The complete one in the photo is a replica in the Warner Nature Center collection. For size reference, that is a standard countertop it is sitting on and the fossil takes up the entire depth of the counter. These large turtles are related to the soft shelled turtles that inhabit rivers today. The basic turtle design is evolutionarily very robust and has changed little over time.

At one particularly interesting site after lunch I picked up some broken pieces of fossil that had washed into a small wash coming off a hillside. Since the pieces were found close together (within a five foot stretch) and all appeared similar I put them into their own bag and asked our leader about them. He said they were from a turtle and that I could keep them as they were just broken scrap type pieces. I took them home and to my delight two of the pieces fit together. As I played with them a second piece fell into place and then a third, then a fourth. All in all there were 18 pieces and 9 of them fit together. That's pretty impressive.

What I can tell is that it is a portion of the anterior right plastron of a turtle. I have one piece of carapace as well. You can see the curved up portion where the plastron would have connected to the carapace of the turtle. It seems about twice as thick as the trionychid shell pieces we found so I need to do some digging to get and idea of what species I'm dealing with. My impression is that trionychid turtles did not have such solid plastrons. I'll post pictures at some point.

I had a great time putting all the pieces together. I just wish I had a whole turtle to work with! It was a like a fantastic challenging jigsaw puzzle but in the end, instead of a photo of a basket full of puppies or kittens, you end up with a fossil of an animal that lived 65 million years ago. Pretty damn cool.

We continued on our hike through the basin learning about geology and fossils until our water ran out and we needed to head back. We spotted a badly crumbled hadrosaur femur on the ground and noted it with GPS before turning for home. Maybe another group can look longer at this area next season.

That's all for Tuesday. More to come later!

~Kirk

Dinosaur Dig (Part 1)

Last summer I taught my regular Fossils to Feathers summer camp and fellow Warner naturalist Bekah Dalen brought in some fossils to show me. She said she got them on a dinosaur dig while working at the Children's Museum. Hmm, we thought, why don't we lead a dinosaur dig though Warner?

Here were the two selling points.

1. Digging up dinosaurs
and
2. Getting paid to do it

Need I say more?

We offered the summer camp this summer and a little over a week ago we took seven kids on a 10 hour van ride to the far nether regions of North Dakota to root around in the famous Hell Creek Formation. (Okay, famous to other geeks, geologists and paleo-types.)

We worked with Marmarth Research Foundation and the week was tons of fun. Fossil wise we found many pieces of trionychid turtles and parts of another species of turtle I need to identify. We found champsosaur bones, a hadrosaur femur, a triceratops femur, a triceratops tooth, a dromeosaur tooth, fossil trees, crocodile teeth, freshwater ray teeth, triceratops frill and more. The pictures tell a good story so let's start there.

We set out on Sunday for the 10 hour ride to Marmarth, ND. The highlight of the trip was of course stopping at the Middle Spunk rest stop in Minnesota (purely because of the name) and stopping to gawk at Salem Sue the world's largest holstein cow statue in New Salem, ND. That's six tons of reinforced fiberglass in the shape of a cow up there on that butte. She's actually the world's largest fiberglass animal. Okay so the picture is awful. Follow the link for up close giant cow bliss.

We arrived in Marmarth just in time for some Tater Tot hotdish. We found this quite hilarious as we were joking with the kids that dinner would be tater tot hotdish and there it was like culinary destiny. Little did we suspect at the time (how foolish) that hotdish would grace our lips at several dinners. The only one that was vile was the chow mein hotdish, the rest were edible. Oh I now wish I had a photo of the tater tot hotdish! There were some folks there from the east coast who were completely perplexed by the hotdish phenomenon. The term casserole was only slightly less alien.

That night we got our room assignments in the Marmarth Bunkhouse. The bunkhouse was built for railway workers back in the old days. As far accommodations for a dinosaur dig this was posh. Most digs involve sleeping in tents so this was nice. There was a phone, showers, private rooms and satellite TV. Weirdly, the kids all wanted to watch shows about serial killers while I preferred spongebob. Go figure.

Monday morning we headed out to a site where kids a few years ago uncovered a hadrosaur femur. There is still probably more of the dino inside the hillside but a LOT of rock would have to be removed to get at it. Maybe someday, but for now there are easier quarry. I found one of my first cool things here. It was a little piece of a trionychid turtle. It was thrilling but little did I know I would be seeing thousands of such parts in the next few days. This site was also home to many many modern rodent bones as a large owl roosted in the area and the ground was littered with bones and owl pellets. Our leader, Doug Hanks, showed us a profile of the rock in the area and taught us how to read the record of what had happened there.

Monday afternoon we headed out to another area to work on a site rich in turtles. It is apparently one of the richest turtle sites in the world. We didn't see any. I used an exacto knife to slowly carve out a one foot square area. In an hour our so I went down about four inches. This is the very unglamourous part of field work. Carefully looking for nothing. The area I worked in was where they had just removed six complete turtles so it was important to keep searching. It was too bad we didn't uncover anything but that's part of the job too.

Dinner Monday was meatloaf hotdish. When I say meatloaf I mean many many pounds of ground beef tossed into a pan, covered in ketchup and baked. I think there may have been a can of "cream of something" soup mixed in. Welcome to flavor country. Why didn't I take any pictures of the food?

That's it for the first installment. I'll post up the rest of the week soon.

~Kirk