Sunday, April 11, 2021

Paleozoic Taxa of the St. Croix Valley

Back when I was working on the Saint Croix National Scenic Riverway project, I'd compiled a spreadsheet of all of the fossil genera and species that had been reported from the rocks exposed along the valley. There had been some talk of spinning it off as a separate thing, but that never happened, so I played with the idea of posting it here. I then forgot about it until recently looking through the backlog of half-formed ideas. The spreadsheet itself was all ready to go, so I figured "why not?"

It's pretty simple; a column of numbers so it can be sorted back to the original organization when I'm working, a column for the genus/species, a column for the broad classification, twelve columns for the formations (go here for a refresher; the names are abbreviated for space, but each one has a note providing the full name), a column for references (defined on the "References" tab), and a column for additional notes. If a given species is present in a particular formation, the corresponding cell is marked "Y" and filled blue; if there's some question, the cell is marked "?" and filled yellow. If it's not present, there's a dash and no color fill. To check it out, you can enter here. I would not be surprised if there has been some oversplitting, if for no other reason than the challenges of preservation (we're dealing with a lot of natural molds and casts of partial trilobites in sandstone; fragility and preservation fidelity leave something to be desired).

It's worth mentioning that there is a document that covers some of the same ground, Raasch (1950). In one sense it's more narrowly focused, on Cambrian trilobite biostratigraphy, but in another it's more diffuse, with a larger area of interest.

References

Raasch, G. O. 1950. Zonal range of Croixan trilobite genera in the upper Mississippi Valley. Cambrian Subcommittee Memorandum No. V. Illinois State Geological Survey, Urbana, Illinois.

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