Subsurface paleontology of Lafayette Square and the Washington Monument

Washington, D.C. is not generally ranked in the first order of fossiliferous areas. It can hardly be considered a bust, though. The "Middle" Cretaceous Potomac Group (due to a tragic geologic oversight, there is no formal Middle Cretaceous) has been reasonably kind for plants; see Fontaine (1889, 1896), Knowlton (1889), Ward (1895), Ward et al. (1905), and Sinnott and Bartlett (1916) for some of the gory details. Something you may notice from that list is that all of those publications are at least a century old. The obvious problem is that Washington is a city first and foremost, so it's not like there are a lot of outcrops for prospecting any more. The Potomac Group has also produced some scrappy dinosaur remains, and anywhere that the Potomac River once flowed is liable to have cobbles with Skolithos tubes, eroded from Cambrian rocks up in the mountains. The classic Potomac Skolithos cobbles are rounded pieces of orangeish quartzite with simple vertical Skolithos burrows, similar to skinny pencils and with a tendency to stand out from the host rock. Washington is also blessed with a profusion of fossiliferous building stone, particularly the inevitable "Indiana Limestone" (Salem Limestone). But I digress. In a city, we cannot come to the outcrop, so the outcrop must come to us. This is where subsurface explorations come in handy. We talked about taking cores from lake sediments a few weeks ago. The subsurface of Washington, like any major city, has been picked at innumerable times, uncovering fossils from places such as just north of the White House and near the Washington Monument.

Isaberrysaura, and the further revenge of gut contents

This week saw the publication of two new dinosaurs. Both of them have something to recommend them, but given my own preoccupations we'll have to leave Xingxiulong for someone else, or for another time. (Feel free to hop over to the paper, though!) Instead, we shall meet Isaberrysaura mollensis, a basal ornithischian packing an identity crisis and a belly full of seeds.

George William Featherstonhaugh

I've been looking at some of the early geological expeditions in the United States for work, and I thought I'd take a couple of posts to look at some of the pre-Civil War geologists who visited the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. We've already briefly looked at William Keating and the Stephen Long expedition of 1823, so I thought I'd move on to the next figure of note, George William Featherstonhaugh.

George William Featherstonhaugh, borrowed from Wikimedia Commons, who borrowed it from the Minnesota Historical Society.