Recent Work from the National Park Service Paleontology Program

My day job is with the Paleontology Program of the National Park Service, and I thought you might like to see some of the work we've put out over the past few months. First up is the Spring 2022 issue of the Park Paleontology newsletter. For this issue, we have articles on:

• The importance of collections
• Paleontology in the Parks Fellowships
• The Petrified Forest National Park prep lab
• The work of the Utah Geological Survey in Utah parks
• The story of the description of a new species from Badlands National Park
• A multi-disciplinary project to understand the namesake fossil beds of Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument
  
• And new artwork for Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument

Next, a couple of articles have just come out in the latest volume of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin series, both focused on Quaternary cave paleontology of specified parks in the southwest. Hodnett et al. (2022) describes previously overlooked bones from Grand Canyon National Park as specimens of the "American cheetah" Miracinonyx trumani. Meanwhile, drawing on the Carlsbad Caverns National Park paleontological inventory published a few years ago, Kottkamp et al. (2022) discusses the Pleistocene vertebrate record of the park's various caves.

Finally, public versions of our four latest park-specific paleontological inventory reports are also available to view and download. For just four parks, they feature a wide range of types of fossils, geology, and geography. They are:

• Colonial National Historical Park, Virginia
• Grand-Canyon Parashant National Monument, Arizona (functionally a companion piece to our work on Grand Canyon National Park)
• Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota
• Yucca House National Monument, Colorado (functionally a companion piece to the Mesa Verde National Park inventory report)

References

Hodnett, J. P., R. White, M. Carpenter, J. Mead, and V. L. Santucci. 2022. Miracinonyx trumani (Carnivora; Felidae) from the Rancholabrean of the Grand Canyon, Arizona and its implications on the ecology of the “American cheetah.” New Mexico Museum of Natural History Bulletin 88:157–186.

Kottkamp, S., V. L. Santucci, J. S. Tweet, R. D. Horrocks, and G. S. Morgan. 2022. Pleistocene vertebrates from Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 88:267–290.