Fossil Bison of the National Park Service

Last year for Fourth of July week I put up a post on dinosaurs of the National Park Service. With the same time of year upon us, I thought I'd try something similar. Now, we haven't had all that much change in NPS dinosaurs over the past year, but there's something else that's even more appropriate: bison. Cue the map!

For this map, parks with paleontological materials of bison are indicated, with two questionable occurrences (18 and 32) represented by gray question marks. See text for caveats. 1. Lava Beds National Monument; 2. Golden Gate National Recreation Area; 3. Santa Monica Mountains NRA; 4. Joshua Tree National Park; 5. Nez Perce National Historical Park; 6. Craters of the Moon National Monument & Preserve; 7. Yellowstone NP; 8. Fossil Butte NP; 9. Timpanogos Cave NM; 10. Arches NP; 11. Glen Canyon NRA; 12. Zion NP; 13. Tule Springs Fossil Beds NM; 14. Lake Mead NRA; 15. Grand Canyon NP; 16. Great Sand Dunes NP & Preserve; 17. Chaco Culture NHP; 18. Gila Cliff Dwellings NM; 19. White Sands NM; 20. Bering Land Bridge National Preserve; 21. Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve; 22. Denali NP & Preserve; 23. Theodore Roosevelt NP; 24. Wind Cave NP; 25. Badlands NP; 26. Missouri National Recreational River; 27. Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve; 28. Lake Meredith NRA and possibly Alibates Flint Quarries NM; 29. Waco Mammoth NM; 30. Padre Island National Seashore; 31. Ice Age National Scientific Reserve (affiliated); 32. Valley Forge NHP.

For bison, I'm not quite as confident with my records as I am for, say, mammoths or sloths or dinosaurs. In large part this is because bison are relative latecomers to North America and their record goes to the present. If you've got a random mammoth bone, nobody's going to blink an eye if you call it "Pleistocene", but a random bison bone is not so indicative. There are probably isolated occurrences of fossil material that I don't know about because they've been classified as recent or not classified at all. In addition, some researchers are strict about not considering specimens paleontological if they are more recent than a certain age, whereas I am not so strict about the Holocene. (Of course, then you get into the overlap with archeology.) Therefore, the list I have is subject to change. At this time, perhaps the most notable occurrence from these 32 parks is an early Holocene bison bonebed found in the Wisconsin side of Interstate State Park, one of the units of affiliated Ice Age National Scientific Reserve (I plan to cover it in more detail at another time). Otherwise, the record of NPS fossil bison is mostly isolated, incomplete material, with some bison dung in cave settings.

Distribution is dominated by parks west of the Mississippi, particularly those larger than a few hundred acres. There are some not currently listed, such as Big Bend NP, Death Valley NP, and Glacier NP, that would not surprise me if they eventually are added. East of the Mississippi we don't have as many large parks, and there's a definite tendency for large mammal records to come from caves, so I would expect to add some of the parks with caves over time.

Or maybe I should look at some of the coastal parks. From O. P. Hay's 1923 catalog of eastern North American Pleistocene finds (extant B. bison gets the next map in the volume).

One of the things you will encounter with the genus Bison in North America is the usual complicated taxonomy. The exact timing of the arrival of Bison in North America is not certain, but bison were established by at least 160,000 years ago. Bison arrived as Bison priscus, the widespread Steppe bison, which was not unlike the modern bison. B. priscus evolved into B. latifrons, which can be distinguished by its large size and enormous horns, and B. antiquus, which was not quite so large nor extravagantly equipped with horns.

For B. latifrons, there was never such a thing as having too much horn. Cincinnati Museum of Natural History & Science mount, photo by James St. John via Wikimedia Commons.

B. latifrons went out of the picture during the most recent Ice Age (a unique sense of timing compared to all of the species that went extinct right after), but B. antiquus was still there to carry the bison banner. B. antiquus in turn evolved into the yet smaller B. bison in the early Holocene, about 10,000 years ago. The transitional phase is sometimes described as another species (or subspecies), B. occidentalis. We ran into B. occidentalis way back in early 2014 on I-35E, and this is also the form that has been identified at the Interstate State Park bonebed.

Regarding forams

Life started out microscopic (at least to humans) and most of it has stayed that way. Of course, many microscopic organisms have poor fossil records, due to factors like lack of hard parts and the whole "microscopic" thing (finding and studying microfossils takes special equipment and expertise that aren't used for collecting, say, brachiopods). However, a subset of microscopic organisms have very significant fossil records. We saw the ostracodes a few years ago, but there are also a number of groups of single-celled organisms that produce hard parts suitable for fossilization. Among the most important are: coccolithophores, phytoplankton which form skeletons of scale-like objects known as coccoliths, micron-scale structures that make up chalk (and which are sometimes called nannofossils because they're so darn small); diatoms, phytoplankton with cell walls made of silica; dinoflagellates, which form organic-walled cysts; radiolarians, protozoans that form body structures of silica; and the subjects of today's entry, the foraminifera, which can be described glibly as "amoebas with shells".

A living foram, the brackish-water benthic calcareous species Ammonia tepida, showing strands of pseudopodia surrounding the coiled test. What do all these terms mean? Read on! (Photo from Wikimedia Commons; unfortunately, no scale, but you'll get an idea of the size of what we're dealing with in the photos to come.)

Your Friends The Titanosaurs, part 1: Adamantisaurus, Aegyptosaurus, and Ampelosaurus

This is the first in what I plan as a periodic ongoing series. The response from this year's two previous titanosaur posts was better than I expected, especially considering what I thought was some dry subject matter, so if people are liking the big lugs, why not have them around more often? There are certainly plenty of species, and hopefully they don't become overwhelming if they feature once a month or so, when some other topic isn't coming together. The plan is to briefly cover three species in a post, in more or less alphabetical order. For example, in this post we have Adamantisaurus mezzalirai, Aegyptosaurus baharijensis, and Ampelosaurus atacis, taking us from Brazil to Egypt to France. The third species would have been Aeolosaurus colhuehuapensis, but because there are three species of Aeolosaurus I thought it made sense to hold it back and make the next post all Aeolosaurus. The next one would have been Alamosaurus sanjuanensis, but I have other plans for it. Therefore, Ampelosaurus atacis gets the call.

Postglacial fragments, featuring Hartman's Cave

Although eastern North America contains many things, it is not noted for its terrestrial Cenozoic sedimentary deposits. Conditions just weren't favorable for the long-term preservation of extensive terrestrial sedimentary formations. Therefore, our knowledge of terrestrial life in this region is largely confined to some transitional coastal settings and what we might call "point sources" in comparison to the great formations of the West: sedimentary deposits of caves, fissures, bogs, ponds, and so on. These in turn are strongly biased to just the Pleistocene and Holocene. We've visited a few of these sites before, around Minnesota (Hidden Falls, I-35, Kirchner Marsh, Loring Park, and in general), and in the District of Columbia, Kentucky (Mammoth Cave), and Pennsylvania (Marshalls Creek Mastodon, Port Kennedy Bone Cave). Here is another site in northeastern Pennsylvania, plus some brief commentary on sites nearby.

Bagualosaurus agudoensis: another sauropodomorph ahead of its time

Our subject today is the newly described Bagualosaurus agudoensis from lower Upper Triassic rocks of southern Brazil. If I'd known back in March 2016 that I'd have the opportunity in a couple of years to write about another "prosauropod" that was "ahead of its time", and that it would include a partial skull justifying a terrible "head" pun, maybe I'd have come up with another title then. Oh, well; spilled milk and all that.

Midwest Ordovician craters: Decorah and Rock Elm

Life in the Ordovician of the Upper Midwest wasn't all warm tropical seas and all the organic particles you could filter. We've already run into giant volcanic eruptions spreading ash far and wide. There was also a significant glaciation at the end of the Ordovician; the ice itself didn't get to tropical North America, but it did lead into major extinctions. We don't have to go to the poles or volcanoes off the coast of North America for dramatic geologic events, though: we only have to go as far as west-central Wisconsin and northeastern Iowa.

The secret identity of "Agathaumas"

If you've been at this dinosaur thing for a while, you've probably encountered this piece of Charles Knight artwork, labeled as Agathaumas:

Agathaumas, Charles Knight's work via Wikimedia Commons.