North American camels: not the run-of-the-mill Christmas camels

In North America and Europe, camels generally keep a low profile except for December, when they show up as part of Christmas iconography: the Three Wise Men, Nativity scenes, etc. The general scarcity of camels in these landmasses makes them exotic. Camels and llamas today evoke specific areas: camels bring to mind deserts from north Africa into central Asia, and llamas are shorthand for the Andes. However, camelids (including camels, llamas, alpacas, and so forth) are actually a North American innovation, circa middle Eocene. Through no particular fault of their own, there are now no longer any native camel species in North America, although as recently as the late Pleistocene, about 126,000 to 11,700 years ago, camels were common. The two flagship models at this time were Camelops hesternus, which translates to the evocative "yesterday's camel", and Hemiauchenia macrocephalus, also known as the "North American llama". The exact taxonomy, of course, is somewhat more bushy when you get into it, but this isn't bad for broad strokes. The camel family filled a number of niches in North America over the Cenozoic, from what we would recognize as roles similar to modern camels and llamas, to giraffe analogues like Aeypcamelus, to plus-sized forms like Megacamelus and Titanotylopus, to analogues of deer and gazelle, such as Poebrotherium (also of note as the first fossil organism named from the White River Badlands; Prout's "Palaeotherium" doesn't count because he didn't actually name it). Here are a couple of examples from the now-vanished North American empire of camels:

The three wells of Fort Monroe, and why they didn't pan out

Fort Monroe at Old Point Comfort in southeastern Virginia, today the namesake attraction of Fort Monroe National Monument, has a long and distinguished history. It also hosts an odd little geologic story. If you're familiar with Chesapeake geology, you may guess the punchline, but don't spoil it for everyone else, okay?

Fort Monroe, during the early stages of the Civil War. Not pictured: somebody contemplating where to sink a well, never dreaming that by the time they stopped in 1869, the war would be long over, the current President would be assassinated, his replacement would be impeached, and the well would only turn up salt water. (image found at NPS monument site).

For understandable reasons, it is useful for a fort to have a secure water supply. Logically enough, the staff at Fort Monroe decided to address theirs by drilling an artesian well. Thus it was that in 1845, work began on a well. Drilling continued until July 1846, at which time a pipe broke at 189 ft (58 m). In terms of getting water, this effort was unsuccessful, but for those of us interested in geology and paleontology, the attempt was a rousing success. The pioneering American microscopist Jacob Whitman Bailey identified a number of fossils, particularly from a unit of fine-grained greenish gray sand 48 to 108 ft (15 to 33 m) down). Identifiable material included coal, foraminifera, stratigraphically useful bivalves and scaphopods, and echinoid spines (Fontaine 1882). The mollusks are typical of the Yorktown Formation, now known to be Pliocene.

By the time of the Civil War, the fort (which remained in Union hands throughout) was still reliant on a cistern. Another attempt to sink a well was begun in 1864, within the walls of the fort (Woolman 1899). This time they reached 907 ft (276 m) (Rogers 1882) before running out of money in September 1869 (Fontaine 1882). Again, a number of marine fossils were found in the sediments, this time also including abundant diatoms, shark teeth, and whale bones (Rogers 1882). Also, like the first well, there was a distinct lack of potable groundwater. The only significant water was struck at 599 ft (183 m), and it was reportedly very saline (Sanford 1913).

There is no sense in doing things halfway, so in 1902 a third attempt was made. This time, they didn't stop until they penetrated crystalline bedrock at 2,254 ft (687 m) (Darton 1902). In eastern Virginia, there aren't a lot of places to view long columns of strata, so this and the 1864 well have attracted a fair amount of interest, popping up from time to time in the literature (e.g. Richards 1945, 1947; Cederstrom 1945, 1957; Powars 2000). Interestingly, Darton (1902) thought there was quite a bit of Cretaceous coastal plain sediments below the fossil-bearing Cenozoic marine sediments, but Cederstrom (1945, 1957) thought it was Cenozoic all the way down. In the end, the well has been quite informative for geologists. In terms of water? The third and final attempt was just as fruitless as the others. When water was tested, it proved to be saline (Sanford 1913).

Now for the punchline: they never turned up potable groundwater for the simple reason that they couldn't. What they had no way of knowing at the time was that during the Eocene, approximately 35 million years ago, an object from space blasted into North America about where the tip of the Delmarva Peninsula is today. Fort Monroe happens to be within the area directly affected by the impact. The sediments down to bedrock were rearranged in the blink of an eye and the preexisting aquifers were completely disrupted. In the impact zone, no matter how far down you go, you turn up salty water (Powars and Bruce 1999; Powars 2000).

References:

Cederstrom, D. J. 1945. Structural geology of southeastern Virginia. Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists 29(1):71–95.

Cederstrom, D. J. 1957. Geology and ground-water resources of the York-James Peninsula, Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey, Washington, D.C. Water-Supply Paper 1361.

Darton, N. H. 1902. Norfolk folio, Virginia-North Carolina. U.S. Geological Survey, Washington, D.C. Folio of the Geologic Atlas 80.

Fontaine, W. M. 1882. The artesian well at Fort Monroe, Va. The Virginias 3(2):18–19.

Powars, D. S. 2000. The effects of the Chesapeake Bay impact crater on the geologic framework and the correlation of hydrogeologic units of southeastern Virginia, south of the James River. U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, Virginia. Professional Paper 1622.

Powars, D. S., and T. S. Bruce. 1999. The effects of the Chesapeake Bay impact crater on the geological framework and correlation of hydrogeologic units of the lower York-James Peninsula, Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, Virginia. Professional Paper 1612.

Richards, H. G. 1945. Subsurface stratigraphy of Atlantic Coastal Plain between New Jersey and Georgia. Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists 29(7):885–955.

Richards, H. G. 1947. Invertebrate fossils from deep wells along the Atlantic Coastal Plain. Journal of Paleontology 21(1):23–37.

Rogers, W. B. 1882. Infusorial deposit of Virginia in the Fort Monroe artesian well. The Virginias 3(10):151–152. Reprinted in Geology of the Virginias, 1884, pp. 733-736.

Sanford, S. 1913. The underground water resources of the coastal plain province of Virginia. Virginia Geological Survey, Charlottesville, Virginia. Bulletin 5.

Woolman, L. 1899. Artesian wells in New Jersey. Pages 59–144 in Annual report of the State Geologist for the year 1898. Geological Survey of New Jersey, Trenton, New Jersey.

Nodosaurus: more than a corduroy armadillo

Ankylosaurians, be they clubbed or club-less, labor in relative anonymity among dinosaurs, bundles of roughage trundling along, only briefly intersecting the limelight of flashier dinosaurs. A few get a bit more press, enough to put them in a respectable second tier of popularity (Ankylosaurus and Gastonia, particularly). Despite being the traditional namesake for the club-less ankylosaurs*, Nodosaurus is not one of them. Instead, it fills a role not unlike a venerable distant relative who occasionally shows up at family functions to hover on the sidelines. We know he or she is there and we show due deference, but there's no particularly warm connection of familiarity. The closest it's gotten to a star turn since it was named in 1889 was as a John Sibbick illustration in the "Normanpedia", where it is depicted as a sort of vaguely armadillo-like creature suspiciously eyeing the reader and bearing a precise gridwork of button-like armor pieces, without a hint of spikes or plates. Oddly, the skeletal restoration on the next page shows a distinctly different pattern of armor, featuring alternating bands of large scutes between the ribs and smaller pieces over the ribs, which unintentionally give it a sort of corduroy texture. As we shall see, there does indeed appear to a corduroy pattern over part of the animal, but there was also a lot more going on.

*This great tradition goes back all the way to the 1970s (Coombs 1978). Prior to this, ankylosaurs were just kind of there as one sort of mash. After this, ankylosaurs were still just kind of there, but now there were two flavors.

Thanksgiving Leftovers

You're probably pretty busy this weekend. How about something light, like some photos? These all come from a few site visits over October and November, taking advantage of the very pleasant autumn weather conditions in the Twin Cities metro.

This and the next photo come from the U.S. Route 10 roadcuts, in the Shakopee Formation (Prairie du Chien Group). All of the little stone rainbows are small domed stromatolites. At very close range, you can distinguish between layers that are "crystalline", so to speak, representing minerals deposited by the microbes, and layers of sand (a grain or two thick). There is a band populated by these small stromatolites about as thick as the area photographed here that extends for at least a few tens of meters. (I do not recommend casual visits along this busy road; the couple of times I've stopped have been Sunday mornings.)

The "Kweichow Sauropod"

"Somebody's got to tell the tale/I guess it must be up to me" — B. Dylan

Among all the other oddities we encountered in the Glut (1982) series in the summer, there was one purported sauropod of particular obscurity, from "Kweichow" (Guizhou). I figured it was the specimen described in Young [Yang] (1948), but was somewhat discomfited to find that it had made itself scarce in the years since 1948. There weren't even any dinosaurs listed in "The Dinosauria" from Guizhou. Had it been re-evaluated as non-dinosaurian, or actually come from a different province? To my surprise, the journal was listed as "in storage" in the University of Minnesota library system, so I fired off an interlibrary loan request and in a few days was the proud owner of a shiny new pdf. Acting on the principle that every dinosaur deserves its day, I present the "Kweichow sauropod".

How To Work Like A Real Paleontological Researcher!

My day job as a paleontological researcher for the National Park Service often involves writing paleontological resource inventory reports for inventory and monitoring networks. Each report consists of chapters on the paleontology of each park in a given network. For example, I am currently working on the Mojave Desert I&M Network. This network includes Death Valley National Park, Great Basin National Park, Joshua Tree National Park, Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Manzanar National Historic Site, Mojave National Preserve, and Parashant National Monument; we'll also throw in Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument, because it's geographically within the network, and if it had existed at the time the networks were created, it would certainly have have been included. In the past week, I just finished writing a draft for Mojave National Preserve. When I work on these reports, in essence I have to become passably conversant with the geology and paleontology of an area I probably know little to nothing about within a few weeks. Having done this kind of work since 2008, I have worked up a system that so far has worked pretty well for me.

The "fossils" of Pipestone National Monument

This is being posted on Halloween, which is fitting for a topic that lingers like a ghost in the literature. Even today, you can still find stray references to the fossils of Pipestone National Monument. "Occasional small trilobites - Lingula, Paradoxides" sounds promising, doesn't it? If you're reasonably familiar with the fossils of Minnesota, you may be wondering why you never heard of this before. There's a pretty good reason: these forgotten fossils are not trilobites or brachiopods, and odds are they are not fossils at all.