Proboscidean update: the Williamsburg mammoth (or mastodon)

Leaving titanosaurs aside for the moment...

A couple of times now, I've featured inventories of National Park Service proboscidean fossils: mammoths, mastodons, and so forth. One of the records that's been stuck as questionable is an 1811 report from the area of Colonial National Historical Park. To quote from the most recent published assessment, in Mead et al. (2020):

“The Williamsburg-area mastodon was first reported in 1811 (Anonymous 1811). The details vary from report to report, but apparently the bones were found 10 km (6 mi) south (Anonymous 1811) or east (Mitchill 1818) of Williamsburg on the south bank of the York River. It is unclear where the former location would be, but the latter is potentially within COLO [Colonial National Historical Park], in the vicinity of Bellefield Plantation and the mouth of Indian Field Creek. Anonymous (1811) reported that the site was a few yards within high water near the home of Gawin Corbin. The fossils include 2 tusks, 2 vertebrae, 1 pelvis, 1 femur, and partial mandibles with 7 associated teeth (Mitchill 1818). Given the presence of molars, it is surprising that Mitchill (1818) identified the specimens as mammoth, yet Hay (1923) reported them as a mastodon (Mammut). Hay (1923) reported that the bones were probably destroyed in the 1859 fire at the College of William and Mary. Clark and Miller (1912) refer this specimen to the Pleistocene of the Talbot Formation (a now-obsolete name)."

I and others have made attempts over the past few years to determine who the Gavin Corbin in question was and where his property was located, most recently as part of the Colonial National Historical Park paleontological inventory currently being reviewed. The primary issue has been the numerous Corbins who have lived in this region, including multiple Gawin Corbins. In such a case, sometimes you have to trust in serendipity, and I can now state that I'm practically certain the answer is at hand. The man in question is Gawin Lane Corbin (1778–1821), and the property is the “Kings Creek” plantation, now within the U.S. Navy's Cheatham Annex just north of the Colonial Parkway.

This was the kind of thing where it was helpful to have some experience in genealogical research. It wasn't enough to have a good candidate for the name; there also had to be a way to track the location. In this case, "Kings Creek" has a lengthy history, beginning as "Utimaria" in 1630 and passing through various hands until being sold to Corbin's father in 1790 (Tyler 1894; Anonymous 1913). Later the area was known as Penniman, and eventually the Navy's Cheatham Annex. Importantly for us, we also know that the Ringfield and Bellefield (or Bellfield, or Belfield) plantations were active in the same time frame as the fossil discovery, on what is now the NPS side of Kings (or King’s, or King) Creek. With this knowledge, we can be certain than any mammoth or mastodon found near the home of Gawin Corbin on the York River shore was found in what would now be part of the Cheatham Annex, and therefore near but not within the historical park. (On the other hand, if anyone from the Annex is reading this, it looks like there's a mammoth or mastodon in your history.)

Presumably Corbin had some idea of the significance of the find for it to have been collected in the first place. He was certainly in a position to have been exposed to discussion of such fossils, having social standing and a college education (William & Mary alum; Anonymous 1922) at a time when fossils of mammoths and mastodons held an unusual fascination beyond their scientific value.

Near the mouth of King's Creek, looking north toward Penniman Spit.

References

Anonymous. 1811. Curious discovery [elephant bones from York River, Williamsburg, Virginia]. Philadelphia Repertory 2:87–88.

Anonymous. 1913. Notes from the records of York County. William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine 22(2):73–89.

Anonymous. 1922. The Corbin Family (continued). The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 30(4):403–407.

Clark, W. B., and B. L. Miller. 1912. The physiography and geology of the Coastal Plain province of Virginia. Virginia Geological Survey Bulletin 4:13–222.

Hay, O. P. 1923. The Pleistocene of North America and its vertebrated animals from the states east of the Mississippi River and from the Canadian provinces east of longitude 95 degrees. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, D.C. Publication 322.

Mead, J. I., J. S. Tweet, V. L. Santucci, J. T. Rasic, and S. E. Holte. 2020. Proboscideans from US National Park Service lands. Eastern Paleontologist 6:1–48.

Mitchill, S. L. 1818. Observations on the geology of North America; illustrated by the description of various organic remains found in that part of the World. Pages 319–431 in G. Cuvier. Essay on the theory of the Earth, with mineralogical notes, and an account of Cuvier’s geological discoveries, by Professor Jameson. Kirk and Mercein, New York, New York.

Tyler, L. G. 1894. Notes by the editor. The William and Mary Quarterly 2(4):230–236.

Your Friends The Titanosaurs, part 33.3: Alamosaurus of Texas and Mexico?

Having visited New Mexico and Utah (with side trips to Wyoming and Montana), we come now to more southerly Alamosaurus, concentrated in the Big Bend region of Texas. After a slow start Big Bend titanosaurs have attracted a lot of study, with numerous publications over the past quarter-century. There are also some less well-documents reports from elsewhere in Texas and across the border in Chihuahua, Mexico. We also have a little more on the question of whether or not we're dealing with just one species, and Tyrannosaurus makes yet another cameo.

This post marks the end of the main part of "Your Friends The Titanosaurs" (I can hardly believe it!) although we do have a few things to follow up with before calling it closed.

A view of the Perot Museum of Natural History mount (Dallas, Texas) emphasizing the neck. The original neck vertebrae are visible near floor level behind the torso of the mount. In the lower right a Tyrannosaurus rex has second thoughts. Photo by Louis Tanner from Garland, TX, USA, CC-BY-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Your Friends The Titanosaurs, part 33.2: Alamosaurus of Utah and points north?

We head north into Utah this time for the next major discoveries of Alamosaurus. Unlike Alamosaurus of the San Juan Basin or the Big Bend area of Texas (as we'll see next time), Alamosaurus sanjuanensis from the North Horn Formation of Utah has been more or less represented by one specimen, although others are known. Fortunately, that one specimen has been very informative in its own right. In addition to Utah, we have sketchy references to finds in Wyoming and Montana to deal with, plus a couple of incomplete threads from the San Juan Basin to tie up.

Your Friends The Titanosaurs, part 33.1: Alamosaurus of New Mexico

The time has come to deal with the one and only named North American titanosaur, the redoubtable Alamosaurus sanjuanensis. You may remember that in the very first post of this series, I mentioned I was skipping Alamosaurus for the moment. I was waiting on it because I was concerned that it might suffer a taxonomic detonation at any time, so I thought I'd hold off as long as possible. Such has not happened (yet).

I originally thought I could get away with one post. This was before I actually sat down to the substantial body of literature on A. sanjuanensis. I ended up going through around 60 references, with another few I haven't been able to find yet due to them being dissertations or conference ephemera or some such. This number does not count the many, many cameo performances for our guest, which turns up in almost every paper dealing with titanosaurs, being cited for anatomical comparisons or included in a phylogeny. This is what comes of 1) a century of publications; 2) being the only named titanosaur in the paleontological hotbed of North America; 3) shouldering the burden of breaking the Great North American Sauropod Hiatus™; 4) being (seemingly) represented by lots and lots of specimens; and 5) having a wide geographic distribution.

In the interests of sanity (both yours and my own dwindling reserves) and length, I'm therefore splitting the material over multiple posts for February, going by geography. There are three natural geographic divisions (New Mexico, Utah, and Texas), plus some miscellaneous records of interest that should fit under that format (Wyoming and Montana with Utah, and Mexico with Texas), so I think three posts will take care of things. We'll start off with New Mexico, because chronologically that's where the story begins.

(Of course, in March someone will publish a paper that will undo everything.)

Vermillion Falls

As the old story goes, when you visit a place, you go to all the sights, but if you live there, you never get around to seeing them. I decided to play the tourist and see Vermillion Falls in Hastings, which I'd never done despite living about 10 to 15 minutes away most of my life. (And yes, it's spelled with two "l"s here.)

Partly frozen over, with adjoining industrial facility at the falls itself.

Looking down into the gorge from above the falls.

Vermillion Falls is a waterfall on the Vermillion River, a tributary to the Mississippi. The falls and downstream gorge are actually not unlike a miniature version of the Mississippi gorge from Fort Snelling up to St. Anthony Falls. Aside from scale, the major difference is the steeper walls. Unlike the Mississippi, which has only had to contend with about 15 to 30 feet (5 to 10 m) of Platteville Formation before getting to the soft underbelly of Glenwood and St. Peter, the Vermillion has the task of cutting through something like 100 to 150 feet (30 to 45 m) of genuine Prairie du Chien Group, which hasn't eroded peaceably for anyone in 475 million years and isn't about to start now. The walls of the gorge have been weathered to a crisp.

Although we can identify several substantial subdivisions, and plenty of beds.

Looking downstream within the gorge, from the floor.

Hastings escaped the attention of the most recent glaciation, so the Vermillion River has had longer to work on its gorge than the Mississippi has in Minneapolis–St. Paul above Dayton's Bluff. Instead, the current incarnation of the Vermillion River postdates the preceding glaciation, the Illinoian, which would make Vermillion Falls's origin about an order of magnitude older than St. Anthony Falls and the other Mississippi gorge falls (i.e., older than a hundred thousand years rather than ten thousand years). Before that, the Vermillion disappears into the hazy web of buried channels beneath the glacial drift. Hastings is surrounded by buried channels, including a massive example south of town cut down all the way into the Franconia (see Mossler 2006 for the layout). In fact, if some evil genius were to remove all of the loose post-bedrock sediment, most of metropolitan Hastings would become a roughly rectangular island. (Also of note: the Hastings Fault only clips the northwest corner of the city.)

Looking upstream in the gorge toward the falls (not visible due to a bend in the river) from a small bridge.

Sneaking a peek from just below.

References

Mossler, J. H. 2006. Bedrock geology of the Hastings Quadrangle, Dakota, Goodhue, and Washington Counties, Minnesota. Minnesota Geological Survey, St. Paul, Minnesota. Miscellaneous Map 169. Scale 1:24,000.

Your Friends The Titanosaurs, Part 32: Volgatitan, Xianshanosaurus, Yamanasaurus, and Zhuchengtitan

Here we are, at the end of the alphabet. You might have noticed that every letter has had an entry except one: W. Wintonotitan sometimes ends up in Titanosauria, but it's not a consensus titanosaur. This means, of course, that those of us who are describing new titanosaurs should consider generic names starting with "W" (as well as adding a couple more to those letters represented by single names). We aren't at the end of the series, though; for one thing, there is still one rather significant genus and species that hasn't yet taken its turn in the spotlight...

Anyway, the four titanosaurs at the end of the alphabet include some of the most recently described genera and species, which isn't really surprising; it wasn't until the past couple of decades that genera beginning with letters after "T" became more than a novelty. Three of the four postdate 2016, leaving Xianshanosaurus as the relative oldster with a 2009 name. This means there isn't a lot of literature for them, so having four in one post seems reasonable. The four are also alike in that each name is a double geographic reference.

J-Term 2001: Zion National Park in the snow

Nothing too heavy for the first post of 2021, just a few photos. These were taken twenty years ago, during field camp with the University of St. Thomas. We were doing mapping in the Rainbow Gardens area east of Las Vegas, in the figurative shadow of Frenchman Mountain. We started out January 7, 2001, and for several days had progressively worse weather until on the morning of the 12th, the forecast was the worst yet, so we drove over to Zion National Park for some geo-tourism. Predictably enough, it snowed at Zion while playing nice at our field area. Anyway, the weather turned for the better after that.

These were all scanned from physical photographs. Forget cell phone cameras; I don't think I'd ever even used a digital camera by 2001. This also means that, unlike today when you take as many photos as you want, I wasn't taking loads of photos a day.

Zion gets about an inch of snow (2.54 cm) on average each month of the winter, so we'd managed to show up on the day of the monthly delivery for January (plus a little more).

Group photo! Apparently black and/or blue coats were the style in Minnesota in the winter of 2000–2001. Our inadvertent coordination (and hats and hoods!) makes it a real puzzle to identify more than about half of us in this photo.

Your host, January 2001. Still have the hat. Welcome to 2021!