Boulder Dam Recreation Area, later renamed Lake Mead National Recreation Area, was established in the 1930s to administer the reservoir Lake Mead that was filling behind Hoover Dam, at the time known as Boulder Dam. As originally conceived, the recreation area extended quite a bit farther east, into what is now part of western Grand Canyon National Park. This is because at the time it was planned that another dam, the Bridge Canyon Dam, was going to be constructed in that area, and the recreation area was sized to accommodate the anticipated reservoir. Obviously, unless you are a reader who has stumbled in from another timeline, no such dam was ever built, and in 1975 the park boundaries were reconfigured, with most of eastern Lake Mead NRA (Grand Wash Cliffs area and east) being transferred to Grand Canyon National Park.
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| This area, as a matter of fact, looking due south into the western end of the park (photo taken from small plane, hence the plane structures and the whole "up in the air" thing). |
Anyway, we were still back in the 1930s. The NPS had a few people on staff in the 1930s who specialized in geology, such as H. Donald Curry at Death Valley and Edwin McKee at Grand Canyon. Working at Boulder Dam Recreation Area was Ed Schenk, who had the challenge of contending with a field area that was steadily shrinking by the day as the reservoir filled. A substantial portion of his work at Lake Mead remains unpublished, but his research on the Cambrian escaped that fate (Schenk and Wheeler 1942). His counterpart at Grand Canyon, McKee, was also working on the Cambrian, and published a rather more famous work a few years later (McKee and Resser 1945). You may not recognize the citation, but if you've studied geology at the college level you may well have run into material that's been derived from this publication, in which McKee described the facies changes of the Cambrian formations in terms of marine advances and retreats: very briefly (and simply), there's the nearshore Tapeats Sandstone, the shallow marine Bright Angel Shale, and the deeper marine Muav Limestone.
As part of his work, Schenk collected fossils from about four dozen localities in and around the recreation area. About a quarter of the collections were from Cambrian rocks, all in that area which is now in western Grand Canyon NP. These collections included a fairly typical assortment of mid-Cambrian life, such as trilobites, brachiopods, and hyoliths. Several of these collections were cited in Schenk and Wheeler (1942). It is not immediately obvious, but the same collections are also cited in McKee and Resser (1945), with a few re-identifications. I only realized it when I thought to check because Schenk was noted as a collector in McKee and Resser (1945). Charles Resser, whom we met briefly earlier, also provided identifications for Schenk's paper. Essentially, the two papers were being worked on contemporaneously with contact between the groups of authors, and Schenk's shorter publication beat McKee's work into press by a couple of years (M&R '45 would also have been affected by wartime circumstances and Resser's passing in 1943).
If you're super-curious about these things, the collections definitely mentioned in both S&W and M&R are as follows, using M&R's stratigraphy ("F-" collections are Schenk's):
Peach Springs Member, Muav Limestone: fauna 73 = F-40
Bright Angel Shale tongue: fauna 74 = F-47
Spencer Canyon Member, Muav
Bright Angel Shale tongue
Sanup Plateau Member, Muav
Bright Angel Shale tongue: fauna 75 = F-37
Rampart Cave Member, Muav: fauna 76 = F-39
Flour Sack Member, Bright Angel Shale: faunas 46, 47 = F-16, F-17
Bright Angel Shale tongue
Tincanebits Tongue, Muav
Bright Angel Shale upper slope units: fauna 48 = F-44; fauna 49 = F.C. 761
Bright Angel Shale red-brown cliff unit?
Bright Angel Shale lower slope units: fauna 8 = F-15
Resser named several taxa from the F-# collections, and the holotypes for these taxa were sent to the USNM. These include Albertella schenki from F-44 (McKee and Resser #48; holotype USNM 108583), Lingulella mckeei from F-17 (M&R #47; USNM 108561a), Acrocephalops? arizonaensis from F-16 (M&R #46; USNM 108624), Kootenia simplex from F-37 (M&R #75; USNM 108591a), Kootenia schenki from F-40 (M&R #73; USNM 108586a), and Solenopleurella porcata from F-40 (M&R #73; USNM 108586a and 108626a). If you check the online USNM database, specimens with photos have the F-numbers on their slabs, showing their origin.
We come now to strange fate. Around 1960, with Schenk having long since left the NPS, staff at Lake Mead sent his old collections to the USGS for taxonomic identification. The USGS used to have a system where field geologists could send material for identification, usually to determine the relative age of rock units for mapping and resource projects. The resulting files were called "Examine & Report" (E&R) files. I've seen the files for the Lake Mead project, which took a while to complete for various reasons. Trilobite specialist A.R. "Pete" Palmer was sent the Cambrian samples for identification. Naturally enough, given the rock units involved, he used McKee and Resser (1945) for reference, as he remarked in the memo. Given that most of the fossils in McKee and Resser (1945) were only mentioned in lists, and type and figured specimens that might have given away the tale were retained from the collections by the Smithsonian, there was very little way of knowing that this exercise was actually about using McKee and Resser (1945) to identify fossils from some of the collections in McKee and Resser (1945).
References
McKee, E. D., and C. E. Resser. 1945. Cambrian history of the Grand Canyon region. Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 563.
Palmer, A. R. 1963/10/17. O-60-55. USGS internal memo to M. B. Ingham (E&R file).
Schenk, E. T., and H. E. Wheeler. 1942. Cambrian sequence in western Grand Canyon, Arizona. Journal of Geology 50(7):822–899.
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