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.

Minnesota's dinosaurs

The stats for Equatorial Minnesota have recently shown visitors looking for "Minnesota dinosaur", no doubt because of the recent announcement of a ~90 million-year-old theropod claw from Hill Annex Mine State Park on the Iron Range. Minnesota, as you might know, is not noted for its dinosaur fossils. (I usually have to add the modifier "non-avian" or "classic" to "dinosaur", but I don't know of any bird fossils, either, unless you want to count refuse bones from archeological sites. Maybe the St. Peter Sandstone holds a buried Pleistocene-age cave in a filled river channel somewhere...) However, there are a handful of reports of Cretaceous dinosaurs from Minnesota.

Algae and not-algae

The last of the fossils to be covered to complete the Upper Ordovician Twin Cities set (barring some microfossils and real rarities) are a nebulous group of oft-times enigmatic organisms that either are algae, or have been classified as algae. "Algae" is a much more problematic a term than you might suspect. To put it simply, "algae" is more of a state of mind than a formal classification. At its broadest, "algae" covers basically anything that does photosynthesis and doesn't have the obvious distinct tissues of derived plants, like leaves and roots. This would include anything from diverse microbes to seaweeds. While this has some utility for back-of-the-envelope things, it is not the most useful term for serious classification. It should not be surprising that untold numbers of fossils have been been classified as algae, and that many of these "algae" belong to disparate groups, some of which still have unsettled classifications. About a half-dozen taxa from the Platteville, Decorah, and basal Cummingsville formations have fallen into the "algae" bin at one time or another. They include the following:

The Compact Thescelosaurus

National Fossil Day is this Wednesday, October 14th. The 16th birthday of Thescelosaurus would have been last Wednesday, October 7th. In honor of both, here is The Compact Thescelosaurus, a sortable spreadsheet of basic information on classic (non-avian) dinosaur species, minus names that have not been formally described. I began working on it shortly after I decided to end the website; I still wanted the information to be available, but I also wanted something that was lower-maintenance, and more flexible to edit. This is what I came up with. The other nice thing about it was that I updated a number of things, which I can now use to clean up my original files and perhaps make them available as pdfs, for people who miss the dry commentary and the nomina nuda. This wouldn't happen for several more months, though. Anyway, here's a short user guide to the spreadsheet below the jump, column by column. If someone wants to use the format for some other group, they are free to do so. Otherwise, have fun!

[A quick note, 2015-10-12: I've received a couple of inquiries about being added as editors. I appreciate the interest, but at this time, I'd prefer to keep this project under one person. Feel free to send corrections and other information, though! (I consider many aspects of taxonomy to be matters of judgement, so we many have to agree to disagree on those matters.)]