This past summer, I had the opportunity to conduct my first field season on Anticosti Island (Québec, Canada). Located in the subarctic of Canada, Anticosti Island preserves a 200 kilometer-long transect of ancient seafloor. Late Ordovician tropical reefs and fossils are beautifully preserved across the island in towering coastal cliffs and river canyons. The sheer size of the island is astounding, and the insight its fossil record could provide into early Paleozoic marine communities is unrivaled. Working on Anticosti over the summer of 2018, I was able to scout out multiple localities across the island that will prove to be critical to my dissertation research, collecting fossils (including some taxa that are yet to be described!) and geological samples for chemostratigraphy. With my undergraduate field assistant, Ryan Caspary, we were even able to find new localities with distinctive Late Ordovician communities not documented elsewhere on the island. Getting to go to Anticosti Island was no small feat- and we were able to complete almost two and half weeks of fieldwork while on the island! This opportunity would not have been possible without University of California Museum of Paleontology, and I am excited about the prospect of heading back this summer!

Working on the last Hirnantian bioherms (the grey, mound-like structures, beneath the paleobiologist for scale) on the eastern end of Anticosti. These reefs are so well preserved that you can extract individual coral heads from the outcrop! Above these reefs, post-LOME strata are marked by the dark grey grainstones of the Becscie formation. It is hard to not smile when you’re sitting on a mass extinction! (Photo credits: Ryan Caspary)

Anticosti Island may hold the key to understanding the second largest mass extinction of life on Earth. Around 445 million years ago, during the Late Ordovician, global climate began to cool. As ice sheets grew over the southern supercontinent Gondwana, global sea level dropped dramatically, draining the shallow epicontinental seas that covered the continents. Over the next two million years, almost eighty percent of species on Earth would go extinct, in an event known as the Late Ordovician mass extinction (LOME). While there is a clear link between climate change and the LOME, the drivers of the extinction remain hotly debated, with possible culprits including marine anoxia, mass volcanism, climate change, or some combination of all three. However, the LOME remains cryptic due to the complex structure of the Upper Ordovician stratigraphic record. Often times, the stratigraphic record is thought of as a layer cake or a book, where each layer in the geological record is a distinct page in the history of life. In reality, the stratigraphic record is more complicated. Fluctuating sea levels, tectonic activity, and changing sedimentation rates create complex sequence stratigraphic architecture that controls the expression of biological events in the fossil record. Understanding sequence stratigraphic architecture is useful for making predictions about patterns of taxa in the fossil record. In any paleobiological analysis, accounting for the structure of the stratigraphic record is critical to interpreting the fossil record. This is especially the case when mass extinctions are involved, as stratigraphic architecture can have a major impact on our interpretation of the timing and drivers of these important events.

The Lousy Cove section on the east end of Anticosti Island- these cliffs continue for several kilometers, allowing for excellent sampling of the LOME. Note the conspicuous grey unit in the foreground (the Laframboise member, here roughly one meter in thickness) can be seen towards the tops of the cliffs in the background!

Due to a rapid drop in sea level at the start of the extinction, it is difficult to find well-preserved and fossiliferous exposures of the LOME fossil record. Often times, the LOME is preserved as thin (condensed) and isolated stratigraphic sections around the world. It can be tricky (and sometimes misleading!) to interpret the extinction from these condensed sections. A series of exceptionally preserved outcrops could provide invaluable insight into the timing and drivers of the LOME. On Anticosti, the LOME is contained within nearly 80 meters of highly fossilferous sedimentary rock across the island- there is perhaps no better record we could use to study the record of marine invertebrates during LOME! However, in spite of its spectacular preservation, it would be difficult to find a more isolated spot in Eastern North America. Anticosti Island is located several hundred kilometers from the nearest major airport, and so travelling to the island is a journey in itself, with one flight to Montreal, another to Sept-Îles, and then one more flight across the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to the island. Once on Anticosti, travel options are limited. The only way to traverse Anticosti is to stop by Port Menier, the only town on the island, rent a truck, gather provisions for a few weeks in the field, and head off across Anticosti. Luckily, unpaved logging roads provide access to some of the most remote, but geologically significant, parts of Anticosti. This is vital to fieldwork: the ability to physically walk across an ancient sea floor is not only what makes Anticosti fantastic geologically speaking, but what makes it a paleobiologist’s paradise.

Working on the Anticosti can be a lot of fun, when you are out on the coast, where strata are exposed in broad modern-day tidal benches. If you ever need a break, you can go for a walk across the Ordovician seafloor! (Photo credits: Ryan Caspary)

Since Anticosti, I have been working hard to catalogue my specimens for the UCMP, learning to identify brachiopods, trilobites, and corals in the process. In addition, I am in the final stages of wrapping up my first-year research project, simulating plausible LOME extinction scenarios in the context of the LOME stratigraphic record. After getting some great feedback on the project during my presentation at the 2018 Geological Society of America Meeting, I am getting ready to submit a manuscript for publication. In addition, I will soon have my second-year oral exams to tackle, and then it will be on to planning for fieldwork on Anticosti this summer to begin the main part of my dissertation research. I am excited to head back Anticosti to begin the next phase of my project!

Vaureal Falls on Anticosti Island contains one of the highest waterfalls in North America (twice the height of Niagra Falls)! More importantly, the sloping strata displayed brilliantly in the canyon walls provide excellent information on marine ecosystems before the LOME. (Photo credits: Nikita Fernandes)

Figure 1. Parasitic snails of the Eulimidae family, probably from the same species, parasitize a sea star (Astropecten sp.). Source: Ria Tan

Figure 2. Competition for space in a tidal area between a species from the Zoanthidae family (a cnidarian) and a barnacle. The barnacles are already partially overgrown and juvenile barnacles do not have sufficient room to grow. Source: Paresh Poriya (Saurashtra University), doi:10.1186/s12898-014-0024-6

Look around in nature or even in the city and you will see that organisms are not static entities, but interact with one another. Think of a robin with a worm in its beak, a tick crawling on your leg looking for a spot to puncture your skin, or two bucks fighting during the rutting season for the right to mate. The sea floor is also a place where animals search or fight for food to stay alive. On the continents, food is not unlimited; every individual tries to collect a piece of the pie (Fig. 1). Individuals of the same species have a fairly similar diet so they compete with each other for food, particularly when food is sparse. One example are individuals of a snail species drilling into bivalve shells to access the soft tissue after many hours of drilling. However, bivalves are also eaten by other organisms such as crabs. There is not only competition for food, but also for space. Examples include moss animals (or bryozoans) competing with each other for space on a rock or other substrate or the battle for space between cnidarians and barnacles (Fig. 2).

Strong competition

There is no doubt that competition occurs, but less is known about the strength and importance of competition affecting ecosystems. The latter is not easy to get at for living organisms because the role of each organism in the ecosystem needs to be well-known. It is even more difficult for fossil ecosystems because the diet is not fully understood for each species and not all animals have the same preservation potential. Nevertheless, paleontologists have attempted to find evidence for competition between taxa. For example, they have investigated the diversity and abundance through time of two groups thought to have competed with each other by having lived at about the same time and place and having had a similar diet. For example, Sepkoski and colleagues (2000) showed that cyclostome bryozoans became much more diverse in the Cretaceous and Cenozoic, while cheilostome bryozoan diversity declined. Strong competition between these two groups with cyclostomes as the winner is an explanation for this pattern.

Extreme competition

An extreme type of competition in which one species rarely co-occurs or does not co-occur with another species within the same ecosystem as a result of competition is called competitive exclusion. This extreme competition can be assessed, even for ancient ecosystems. Needed are many samples of an ecosystem with specimens determined to the species-level to investigate evidence for competitive exclusion statistically. This method has been used for some time in ecology, but rarely in paleontology thus far. Luckily, there is sufficient data for modern and ancient sea floors from many places on Earth. Let’s use this data! After some programming so that the observed frequency of co-occurrence versus the expected frequency of co-occurrence for each species pair is statistically evaluated, computers were set to work for hundreds of hours in total to do analyses for all pairs of all datasets. The computers got hot!

Sea floor

The results clearly indicate that competitive exclusion is very rare on ocean bottoms today. The same holds true for ancient sea floors, despite the fact that diversity and presumable animal density has increased in the last ~550 million years to the extent that enhanced competitive interaction may be expected. In rare cases where species pairs occur less frequently than expected by chance, worms and amphipod arthropod pairs are involved. These taxa are known to compete heavily for resources today. The overall result does not change when only mollusks, a group that is abundant in both modern and fossil datasets, are used for the analysis.

Now let’s look at competitive exclusion from a different angle. Competition is likely to be stronger among related taxa, such as species within the same genus because such taxa often have a similar life habit, diet, and dispersal ability. Conversely, species that are only very distantly related, a clam and a lobster for example, often have a very different ecology. Strong competition between these species is unlikely to occur. This so-called competition-relatedness hypothesis was already mentioned by Charles Darwin, but has rarely been tested so far. To test this hypothesis for the sea floor, the computer was put to work again. As expected, distantly related species pairs rarely showed evidence for competitive exclusion, but the same result was also found for species within the same genus. There is one exception: in relatively deep waters, elevated levels of competitive exclusion were detected such as among species pairs of brittle stars (Fig. 3) and again worms and amphipods. This result is based entirely on data from the modern English Channel between France and England; not enough data from deeper waters was available for other areas.

Figure 3. The brittle star Ophiura albida (left) and Ophiura ophiura (right) both live in the English Channel, but rarely co-occur, likely due to competitive exclusion. Source brittle star images: Hans Hillewaert

Predators and storms

So why is competitive exclusion very rare? The most likely explanations are that storms and predators damp strong competition between species. A storm may cause an organism to be displaced or killed, while predators injure or kill specimens so that space opens up in ecosystems. As a result, competing species co-occur more frequently relative to a situation where competition is the dominant or only force. The influence of storms and predators is lower in deep waters so that competition may be more important there. This could be the reason why elevated levels of competitive exclusion were found in deep waters in the English Channel. Do the results mean that competition is not happening in shallow waters? No, competition is certainly also common there, but an extreme type of competition leading to competitive exclusion is seldomly seen in these environments.

References

• Klompmaker, A.A. & Finnegan, S., 2018. Extreme rarity of competitive exclusion in modern and fossil marine benthic ecosystems. Geology 46: 723–726. https://doi.org/10.1130/G45032.1
• Sepkoski, J.J., McKinney, F.K. & Lidgard, S., 2000. Competitive displacement among post-Paleozoic cyclostome and cheilostome bryozoans. Paleobiology 26: 7–18. https://bit.ly/2OP2LCi

The UCMP Field Trip group at the Annie Alexander interpretive panel at Petrified Forest National Park. (Back row: Daniel de Latorre, Jaemin Lee, Sara Kahanamoku, Ben Mudduman, Josh Zimmt, Julia Sigwart. Front row: Helina Chin, Zev book Adiel Klompmaker, Mackenzie Kirchner Smith, Nick Spano, Sara ElShafie, Ivo Duijnstee, Seth Finnegan and Cindy Looy with the longest petrified conifer at Petrified Forest National Park. Photos and video by Helina Chin unless otherwise noted.)

Four states, nine days, 2,850 miles, 48 hours cumulative driving and enumerable sponges. The Field Methods in Paleobiology Course, also known as the 2018 Spring Break Field Trip, from March 24, 2018 to April 1, 2018, was a whirlwind tour of the Southwest with IB Faculty/UCMP Curators Cindy Looy, Ivo Duijnstee and Seth Finnegan leading a group of students, a professor on sabbatical and one staff member to West Texas to the explore the ancient Capitan Reef formation in and around Guadalupe Mountains National Park. This field trip would take the class to Petrified Forest National Park, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument among other geologically interesting sites. The Field Methods in Paleobiology course started early in the semester with Cindy, Ivo and Seth facilitating presentations made by the students describing the paleogeography and paleobiology of the sites we planned to visit.

Video of group in Kinny Brick Quarry (taken with permission from the owner.)

Rough map of our trip (via Google Maps.)

Day 1: Leaving UC Berkeley

We began our journey with some long haul driving from UC Berkeley to Kingman AZ, a city on historic route 66 just 20 minutes from the border between California and Arizona and left bright and early the next morning towards our next stop: Petrified Forest National Park.

Day 2: Space Rocks and Petrified Forests

Span of the crater at Meteor Crater Natural

While making our way to Petrified Forest National Park, we stopped at Meteor Crater Natural Landmark, a place where rocks from space met rocks from Earth. The immense power from the impact of the meteor overturned the original layers of rock, leaving the oldest layer, the Cococino sandstone, at the top rim of the crater. The crater measures 1200 m (3,900 ft) in diameter and 120 m (560 ft) in depth.

Next, we drove out to Petrified Forest National Park and met with friend and NPS Ranger Charles (Chuck) Beightol who gave us a tour of the prep lab and paleontology collections. Along with the petrified conifers, PEFO also holds some amazing fossil reptiles. Crocodile-like phytosaurs and armored aetosaurs are among their most well-known fossils.

Chuck Beightol, on the left, describes their latest jacketed fossil, a phytosaur, to Ivo Duijnstee, Nick Spano and Daniel de Latorre.

Sara ElShafie takes a closer look at a phytosaur

The signature feature of PEFO is the Painted Desert, a vast area filled with beautiful multi-colored rock formations. The colors come from the different stages of oxidation of minerals, mainly iron and manganese, mixed with volcanic ash that collected in the area many millions of years ago. Over time (geologic time), water repeatedly flooded and cut into the rock, further depositing minerals, and resulting in the brightly colored and contrasting layered bands seen in the Teepee and Butte geologic formations. The same process also gave the petrified conifers and fossils their unique color.

View of the Painted Desert from Chinde Point

Close up of petrified wood

Ivo in front of the Blue Mesa member.

Historically important to the UCMP, we visited a spot near the Teepees where an interpretive panel celebrated “Pioneers of Paleontology,” namely UCMP founder Annie Alexander and paleontologist Charles Camp. Finally, we left for Arizona for Albuquerque NM, host city for the 2018 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Conference in October.

A tiny guestbook at the Annie Alexander interpretive panel.

Day 3: Kinney Brick Quarry
Our next stop was an exciting one, visiting Kinney Brick Quarry to collect fossils! We were graciously invited to an offsite quarry owned by Kinney Brick Co., a clay brick manufacturer, with paleontologist Spencer Lucas of the University of New Mexico and owner, Ralph Hoffman. This site is unique in that it is an active quarry, and we were allowed to dig before the clay was trucked away for brick manufacturing. This area is known as a lagerstätte in the Pennsylvanian. This unique clay and lagoonal pool combination meant many different plants and animals washed into the area, creating a treasure trove of fossils. The fine clay was an ideal substrate to preserve the details of the fossils. Pteridophytes, lycopods, molluscs and even fish were found on our dig.

Nick Spano finding lycopod

From left to right: Adiel Klompmaker, Sara ElShafie and Helina Chin splitting shale.

Jaemin Lee finds a leaf rib among some bivalves

Day 4: Carlsbad Caverns National Park
A brief visit from a local road runner served as a good omen as we hit the ‘road running’ in the morning and made our way to Carlsbad Caverns National Park to trek into the largest cave system in North America. The Carlsbad Caverns is a system of caves that were once part of a Permian reef in the Delaware Basin of Texas and New Mexico. Over time, sulfuric acid dissolved most of the limestone, leaving incredibly vast cavities where one could readily imagine large prehistoric creatures swimming through, living their best prehistoric lives. These days, speleothems (cave formations) made of gypsum are present in this cave along with interesting stops like the “Bottomless Pit,” evidence of the cave’s early explorers still present today.

Road runner friend sending us off. Photo by Jaemin Lee

From left to right wearing backpacks: Ben Muddiman, Sara ElShafie, Sara Kahanamoku and Larry Taylor at the entrance of the cave

Inside Carsblad Caverns, an old rope ladder left behind by previous explorers

Gypsum flowstone

Back on the road, we stopped to explore another exposed outcrop in nearby Walnut Canyon and met up with a geology class taught by Seth Finnegan’s colleague and friend Professor Shanan Peters from University of Wisconsin, Madison. This was a first look at some nicely exposed marine invertebrate fossils, an indication of what we would see on our McKittrick Canyon hike the next day. Unfortunately, rain clouds interrupted our exploration of this part of the ancient reef system. We set off to our camp site right over the state line at Guadalupe Mountains National Park in West Texas. The rain was still coming down during our dinner prep and we tailgated to keep our food prep dry.

Day 5: Permian Reef Trail in McKittrick Canyon at GUMO

Panorama image of part of the exposed reef

A drying creek running through the reef.

The group got up bright and early for our next adventure: hiking up Permian Reef Trail in McKittrick Canyon in Guadalupe Mountains National Park (GUMO). While the views of Texas and New Mexico from top of the trail were gorgeous, for our group the most interesting views were directly beneath our feet. Our time was spent hiking was easily 20% of the hike itself, the other 80% was spent with faces pressed the against the rock looking for more signs of prehistoric life. The rest of the reef patiently waited for us to climb.

The group at the bottom of the reef.

The group hiking past a large chunk of limestone, photo credit Helina Chin

Fossilized marine invertebrates were easily found in the limestone right on the trail. Crinoids, corals and rugose sponges were plentiful lower in the canyon, but as we progressed up the trail we encountered more cellularly complex creatures. We saw net-shaped fenestrated bryozoans and eventually encountered a key fossil group of extinct foramifera called fusilinids. One of the largest microfossils, these cigar shaped forams are also rare in occurance, making them great index fossils. We also saw evidence of trilobites and nautiliods as we ascended. After a long trek up to the top, we saw the expansive views of Texas and New Mexico. If not for these exposures, it would be even more difficult to imagine the entire canyon including El Capitan, the second highest peak in Texas, being underwater nearly 300 million yearsago.

Fenestrated bryozoan

Rugose sponges (note the crepe-like texture)

Cross section of fusilinid at 10 x magnification.

Cross section of fusilinid at 10x magnification.

Day 6: Science on the road and off the road.

Road cuts highlighted the interesting geology of the Brushy Canyon Formation. This area was paleogeographically further away from the reef, showing us the floor of the lower depth of the sea. Here the group observed a large scale flow deformation feature in the sandstone, with layers of siltstone in between. Looking behind us, we could see the edge of the reef we had explored the day before. We spent some time off-roading and spelunking at the Parks Ranch Campground.

El Capitan

Incredible sunset exposures at Guadalupe

Students discussing the paleoecology of the area.

Seth Finnegan balancing on the sloped exposure.

An interesting fold in the sandstone. Graduate student Daniel de Latorre for scale.

Day 7: West of Texas

Stopping at a salt flat some ways away from the reef exposure.

After 3 nights at Guadalupe Mountains National Park, we left to make another stop on our long haul loop back to Berkeley. After stopping briefly to view a salt flat and a few more road cuts, we headed west towards Arizona, this time on our way to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Due to the proximity to the US-Mexico border, there were four border patrol check points into the park. As we were a group traveling with many international students, it was important to address in the planning stages to bring all forms of official identification on this trip, double and triple checking that their official documentation was present and unexpired.

Once we got through the check points, we found our campsite and spent the evening cooking, getting stabbed by cacti, chasing lizards by the light of the full moon and making friends with local wildlife.

Gila woodpecker. Photo by Jaemin Lee

Sunrise at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

Day 8: From the Painted Desert in New Mexico to the Painted Canyon in California - Californian Geology

After a fun morning checking out the cacti at sunrise, we packed up again and made another long haul out to Mecca Hills Wilderness Area to check out the Painted Canyon, outside of Palm Springs. The relatively recent geologic activity of California is evident here, where we observed some large scale deformities along the San Andreas fault. Rock layers are upturned and exposure of rocks of all ages characterized by their different colors.

Painted Canyon at Mecca Hills Wilderness Area

Cindy and Ivo preparing chili dinner at Mecca Hills

Climbing ladders on the river cut trail

Graduate students Ben Muddiman (left) and Daniel de Latorre (right) jumping to reach evidence of a fault.

Day 9: On our way home

The group at the top of the Painted Canyon hike.

Our Spring break ended in Mecca Hills as we got on the road for our final leg of back to UC Berkeley. It was a demanding driving schedule to get there and back again but it was well worth the effort. Next year’s location is to be determined, but should be filled with fun and fossils!

Student Lauren Fowler cataloguing.

Thanks to our recent digitization projects, UCMP now has topped 100,000 cataloged invertebrate specimens!

At least 6500 of these are fossil insects, millipedes and spiders digitized by Dr. Diane Erwin and undergraduate students under Berkeley's Fossil Insect PEN. Helping make all this possible was the work by the following participants: Dr. Marwa Wafeeq Abdelkhaliq Ibraheem (Ain Shams University, Egypt; volunteer), graduate students Winnie Hsiung and Rosemary Romero, as well as undergraduate students: Iyawnna Hazard, Lin Wang, Meralina Morales, Hiep Nguyen, Madeleine Little, Meschelle Thatcher, Asma Faraj Ahmed, Julia Anderson and Emily Duda.

Clockwise from top left, students who helped UCMP catalog specimens: Iyawnna Hazzard, Lin Wang, Marwa Ibraheem, and Meralina Morales

Over 2400 marine invertebrates from the former San Francisco State University collection have been cataloged under the direction of Drs. Lisa White and Pat Holroyd, with the help of Alexis Williams, Erica Clites and other student assistants. Hundreds of bivalves and gastropods have been cataloged from the early Eocene ponds of Wyoming by Dr. Howard Hutchison and Lauren Fowler as part of a curatorial project led by Pat Holroyd, Lisa White, and Charles Marshall.

Staff, volunteers, and assistants who helped to catalogue the EPICC collection.

The largest project is the Eastern Pacific Invertebrate Communities of the Cenozoic (EPICC), which has cataloged more than 38,000 new specimens over the last three years. UCMP staff Erica Clites and Lillian Pearson, as well as student assistants Katie Berlin, Patrick Garcialuna, Lesly Ann Llarena, Michele Maybee, Annemarie Peacock, Emily Turkel, Paula Gomez Villalba, Yujing Wu and Priscilla Zhang cataloged, identified and labeled specimens. We would also like to thank Austin Hendy and Katy Estes-Smargiassi of the Los Angeles County Museum and Chuck Powell (USGS-retired) for help with specimen identifications!

Funding for these projects was provided by the National Science Foundation (1503678, 1561759, 1203600, 1503671) as well as the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS MA-30-15-0336).

With more taxonomic information now online, it easier for researchers to find specimens of interest or to use the data in reconstructions of paleoclimate or paleoecology.

Figure 1: Waines’ stromatoporoid collection is housed in metal cabinets with wooden drawers at the UCMP. Photo courtesy of author.

Russell H. Waines was a geologist who dedicated most of his life to ancient sponges, the stromatoporoids, which were one of the most important reef builders during the Paleozoic. When I was a graduate student researcher at the UCMP in 2013, I had the pleasure of organizing this collection (Figure 1), which includes approximately 2000 fossil specimens (566 of which are registered in the UCMP database) mainly from the Devonian of Nevada, but also from Alaska, Arizona, California, New York, Utah, Washington, the San Juan Islands, and Ontario. In addition to the fossil specimens, this collection has 910 slides (Figure 2) prepared by Waines during his dissertation work.

Russell Waines got his Ph.D. in Paleontology from UC Berkeley in 1965, under the supervision of J. Wyatt Durham. For his dissertation work, Waines performed a taxonomic study of the Devonian stromatoporoids from Nevada, which included four of the five stromatoporoid families: Labechiidae, Clathrodictyidae, Acrinostromatidae, and Idiostromatidae. He also revised the stratigraphic zones for the Upper Devonian and proposed a new zone using stromatoporoids as bioindicators.

Figure 2: This collection houses 16 boxes with the slides from cross sections of the specimens. On the right are images of some of these slides. Photo courtesy of author.

Figure 3: Drawings of the cross-sections from four of his “new species”. Photo courtesy of author.

Waines’ dissertation is a great monograph that includes a thorough morphological analysis of 30 stromatoporoid species with drawings of their cross-section (Figure 3). Impressively, 28 out of the 30 species analyzed by Waines were unknown to science and still are (Figure 4)! His dissertation was never published; therefore, the species described by him are not considered valid by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. This collection is a great resource for stromatoporoid workers and if his species analyses were accurate, there are 28 new species in the UCMP drawers just waiting to be properly formalized.

Following his Ph.D., Russell Waines was hired by the New Paltz State University of New York where he retired in 2006. During his career, he published 13 scientific papers and 24 conference abstracts. His stromatoporoid works include:

Fritz, M.A. & Waines, R.H. 1956. Stromatoporoids from the Upper Abitibi River Limestone. Proceedings of Geological Association of Canada 8:87–126.

Waines, R.H. 1960. Stromatoporoids of the Kennett Limestone, Shasta County, California. Geological Society of America Bulletin 71(12):2081.

Langenheim, R.L., Jr.; Carss, B.W.; Kennerly, J.B.; McCutcheon, V.A. & Waines, R.H. 1962. Paleozoic section in Arrow Canyon Range, Clark County, Nevada. AAPG Bulletin 46:592–609.

Wilson, E.C.; Waines, R.H.; Coogan, AH. 1963. A new species of Komia Korde and the systemic position of the genus. Paleontology 6(2):246–253.

Waines, R.H. 1964. Devonian stromatoporoid faunas of Nevada. Geological Society of America Special Paper 76:230–231.

Waines, R.H. 1965. Devonian stromatoporoids of Nevada. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. 505 p.

Figure 4: Images of two “type” specimens described by Waines in his dissertation. He gave temporary UCMP numbers to all “new” specimens he described; the top image, for example, shows a “paratype” with the temporary number UCMP 11120, which has been now changed to UCMP 13982. Locality numbers (e.g. B9405) were not changed. Most of the specimens are also cut to make slides. The bottom image shows a “holotype” that has been cut: the code A-83-R refers to the slide with its cross-section (apparently A-83 refers to a group of specimens from the same locality, and R refers specifically to this specimen), and the number 10 refers to this taxon. Photo courtesy of author.

The EPICC project (Eastern Pacific Invertebrate Communities of the Cenozoic) is pleased to launch the first suite of virtual fieldwork experience (VFE) modules set in the Kettleman Hills near Coalinga in Central California. Using high-resolution images, high quality panoramas, photographs, and video clips, supported by easy to understand text, we bring to life the field to museum connection for general and classroom audiences. There are five modules:

• Explore Geology
• Explore Sediments
• Explore Fossils
• Field to Museum
• What is a Fossil?

These each can be explored in any order and with practically any level of background. Learning guides are provided for teacher and student use, and a glossary of terms helps to supplement basic geological and paleontological definitions. Bringing these unique and extraordinary places to life, create special opportunities to engage learners in the value of Earth science fieldwork and its connection to museum fossil collections, https://epiccvfe.berkeley.edu/.

Understanding Global Change
FREE Workshop and Materials for High School Science Educators
April 28 & 29, 2018, 10:00am – 4:00pm
Valley Life Sciences Hall, UC Berkeley

Space is limited! Registration closes April 20, 2018 or earlier if fills.

To register, please contact Jessica Bean jrbean@berkeley.edu.

The University of California Museum of Paleontology is hosting a teacher professional development program to support the teaching of the global change topics. We are recruiting 15 teacher leaders to implement the Understanding Global Change resources that support the integration of Earth systems into high school curricula, and disseminate these materials to local school districts. Teacher participants will be paid a $200.00 stipend for the weekend and for sharing resources with their colleagues during September-October, 2018. Topics will include climate change, sea level rise, local mitigation efforts, and human drivers of change.

Scientists and educators will introduce teachers to UCMP global change resources in development with Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) and the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN), including materials from the California Academy of Sciences. There is no cost to attend the workshop and participating teachers will receive support materials and a $200.00 stipend.

Please bring your own lunch!

Members of the Looy Lab - Jeff Benca, Ivo Duijnstee, and Cindy Looy - co-authored a paper in the journal Science Advances.  It details exciting new findings from experimental research on the effects on UV-B induced stresses on forest decline during the end-Permian extinction.

Read more in the University press release.

View the video:

The Deccan Traps today. Photo courtesy of Mark Richards

The Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg or K-T) mass extinction — the event in which the non-avian dinosaurs, along with about 70% of all species in the fossil record went extinct — was probably caused by the Chicxulub meteor impact in Yucatán, México. However, scientists have long wondered about the massive volcanic eruptions that were occurring in northwestern India at about the same time, the Deccan Traps. Volcanism is the likely cause of several prior mass extinctions, with no convincing evidence for impacts. Was the aligned timing of these events at K-T time (asteroid impact, extinction, and volcanism) pure coincidence? I am part of a diverse research team, which includes UCMP associates Paul Renne and Walter Alvarez, working on an NSF-funded project that seeks to answer this question using many different lines of evidence.

We are more precisely dating Deccan lavas, analyzing new rock samples from onshore field work and offshore drilling, and performing geophysical modeling in an effort to figure out how an asteroid impact, a mass extinction, and volcanism might or might not be tied together. Work so far suggests that the main phase of these volcanic eruptions, the largest of the past 100 million years of Earth history, correspond with ever-increasing precision in time with the Chicxulub meteor impact in Yucatán, México, and therefore also to the extermination of the non-avian dinosaurs and about 70% of all species in the fossil record 66.04 (+/-.03) million years ago. The tantalizing implication is that the meteor impact caused a factor of 2-3 increase in the lava flow rate, greatly increasing the likely environmental damage from release of volcanic gases and aerosols. Thus, the alignment of these disastrous events does not seem to be coincidental!

I’d like to invite the UCMP community to follow our ongoing research on our new website, where we will present the activities and scientific results of our project to explore the nature, physical mechanisms, and precise timing of the Deccan Traps flood basalts. There, we will keep you up to date with our fieldwork, geophysical modeling, geochemical and geochronological analyses, and our database and publications, as well as highlight the many individuals involved in the project, including graduate students, postdocs, and a number of distinguished international collaborators. Come visit us at disaster central: https://deccan.berkeley.edu/

Researchers Tushar Mittal, Courtney Sprain, Loÿc Vanderkluyson, Paul Renne, me (Mark Richards), and Kanchan Pande visiting a step well near our field site in Ahmedabad, Gujarat State, India. The carved stones behind us are not Deccan basalts, but they are very impressive!

Top: Annie Alexander watches Eustace Furlong in a quarry on the east slope of Saurian Hill. Bottom: The approximate location of the same quarry today. Top photo from Alexander’s Saurian Expedition of 1905 scrapbook, UCMP archives; bottom photo by David Smith.

In 1905 UCMP benefactress Annie Alexander financed and took part in an expedition to the West Humboldt Mountains of Nevada to collect vertebrate fossils in the Triassic limestones. The crew came home with portions of some 25 ichthyosaur skeletons. Alexander put together a scrapbook containing her chronicle of the trip and many photographs; the scrapbook was given to UCMP following Alexander’s death in 1950 and is one of the most treasured items in the museum’s archives.

Up until now, the scrapbook has only been accessible to a handful of researchers, but the text has been transcribed, the photographs scanned, and a pdf is now available online.

Earlier this year, UCMP retiree David Smith revisited the West Humboldt Mountains and successfully relocated some of the quarries where Alexander et al. collected their ichthyosaur fossils. His adventure, with several “then and now” photographs, has recently been posted.

Alexander was one of seven participants in the 1905 expedition. You can learn more about the lives of her companions in another new story.

Links to the scrapbook and associated stories can be found on The Saurian Expedition of 1905 page.