Scientist at Work Blog: Cool Fossils and Hot Rocks

Randall Irmis, curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah and an assistant professor at the University of Utah, is investigating the rise of dinosaurs in southeastern Utah.

Friday, Aug. 31

Seeing the stark landscape of southern Utah, we often think of it as an untouched wilderness. Yet, it?s easy to forget that these lands witnessed at least 13,000 years of human occupation before any Westerner visited, and this has profoundly affected the ecosystems we see today.

As our team searches for fossils among the canyons and washes of southeastern Utah, we see evidence of a more recent alteration of the landscape. In the 1950s and 1960s, this area was the center of the uranium mining rush, as the United States government offered a premium for any ore discoveries that might lead to a uranium deposit that could be mined. This effort was spurred on by cold-war economics and national security concerns.

We commonly come across old mining roads, adits, abandoned machinery and miners? trash as we look for our more ancient quarry. Yet this is not just a curious part of the recent past; increased demand for uranium has led to renewed interest in the Chinle Formation uranium deposits in our area. Therefore, one of our goals is to understand what fossils are found in the layers that also produce uranium ore, to ensure that any future mining doesn?t destroy scientifically important evidence of ancient life.

And that search for fossils from the time of early dinosaurs is proceeding well! We continue to find remains from different plants and vertebrate animals that lived some 210 million years ago. New discoveries include many different parts of the skeletons of the crocodilelike phytosaurs.

The past few days we?ve focused on a site that we?ve excavated over several years. Several rock layers at this locality preserve more than a dozen species of fossil fish, which are otherwise rare in the Chinle Formation.

Because these layers extend horizontally into the hillside, we first have to remove all the rock above these strata to expose the fossils. This process, called overburden removal, has occupied us for the past day and a half as we use picks and shovels to slowly dig down to the fossil layer. I?ll check in next time with the fruits of our labor.

To read more about the American uranium rush of the 1950s, check out ?Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock That Shaped the World,? by Tom Zoellner.

This research is supported by a grant from the National Geographic Society ?s Committee for Research and Exploration , and is conducted with research permits from the Bureau of Land Management and the State of Utah.

Source: http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/cool-fossils-and-hot-rocks/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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