“And… That’s a Wrap”

We are wrapping up our first paleontological mitigation contract here in my hometown of Scotts Valley and we took this opportunity for a promotional marketing photoshoot over the weekend for our new business website.  Pacific Paleontology was hired to monitor a small subdivision construction project here that involved digging down into the Santa Margarita Formation layer of rock, which is about 10-12 million years old.  This is a rock layer that is common in our area, is one that I have been studying here for the past four decades, and have discovered many hundreds of fossils from, primarily sharks.  The marine vertebrate fauna includes toothed and baleen whales, sharks, fish, rays, skates, dolphins, porpoises, sea turtles, birds, pinnipeds (eared and earless seals and primitive walruses), sirenians, and desmostylians, among others.  Marine clams, snails, and other invertebrates also occur here and are highly diverse in the local region.  Terrestrial vertebrates, such as camels and horses, as well as rare woody plants are also known to occur in the Santa Margarita.  No fossils were uncovered during construction in the massive medium-grained unconsolidated sands that used to make up the bottom of the ocean here.  Now that the grading is completed, Pacific Paleontology is tasked with producing the reports that will show compliance of the project to federal, state, and local legislation for the conservation of protected historical resources.  These regulations are relatively new within the past 20 years, and our understanding of the evolutionary history of life in California and elsewhere has advanced significantly due to the recovery of fossils through these protections.  As a coincidental aside, I worked closely onsite with Tracy Miller of MTM Tractor.  As it turns out, Tracy and I have a history together!  The last time we saw each other he was in jr. high and I was in high school and we were working together at a local restaurant in town; so we had some catching up to do!  Small world!!!

For more information on the fossils of the Santa Margarita Formation check out our video on the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History website: https://www.santacruzmuseum.org/naturalist-night-santa-cruz-sandhills/ 

#Paleontologist, #paleontology,  #SantaCruz, #mitigation, #mitigationpaleontology, #pacificpaleontology, #fossil, #fossilhunting, #santacruzmuseum, #fosssilprep, #fossil, #scottsvalley, #Miocene, #SantaMargarita, #SantaMargaritaFormation, 

 

“How Old Do You Think That Mastodon Is?”

 

I am incredibly excited to announce that after 42 years since its initial discovery, the Aptos Mastodon, Mammut sp., on exhibit at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, will be formally getting C-14 dated in the coming weeks! Discovered in a creekbed by then-high school student James Stanton, who was searching for antique bottles in the water just after the heavy storm surge of 1980, the skull has been on exhibit at the museum for the past 40 years. Fast forward to this week and the bone and plant samples, once I get them cleaned with distilled water of any attached sediment or other materials sticking to them, will be sent off to NOSAMS the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Lab, which is a part of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution!  The three samples will consist of a fragment of the bone from the inside of the mastodon’s skull, called pneumatic bone due to its looking like swiss cheese, an exterior fragment of skull bone, and a piece of carbonized wood that was discovered in contact with the bone around the skull all those years ago.  Specimens need to be younger than 50,000 years before present in order for the C-14 process to work, anything older and an indeterminate age is assigned.  Back in 1980, during the reconstruction of the mastodon’s skull, the two largest pieces of its skull were painstakingly reunited over a two-year period, with hundreds of fragments leftover from the process.  In true museum detective story fashion, the box that all the fragments were stored in remained unaccounted for over the past 3 years, until I was contacted last week with the amazing news that the box, untouched since I packed it away 40 years ago (see pics below), had been discovered once again!  The river gravels that the skull was preserved in, an incredibly rare process, have never been absolutely dated, only relatively dated.  What this means is that we might be able to assign an exact age to the mastodon and river sediments, if they are younger than 50,000 years old, instead of having a rough estimate of their age based on other rock layers nearby.  And if the mastodon samples come back with an indeterminate age, that is also important information, for then we will be able to say that the sediments, and the mastodon, are older than 50k!  And for those of you who may be wondering why in the world would the inside of a mastodon’s skull look like swiss cheese, well it has to do with biomechanics.  All proboscideans; mammoths, mastodons, and elephants, have pneumatic bone (see sample pic below), or skull bone with large “air pockets” in it rather than solid bone due to it being much lighter than solid skull bone and yet still strong.  Think of all that weight that the proboscidean has to hold up and out; so the lighter the better!   Stay tuned in the coming weeks after the tests come back to learn… the rest of the story!

https://www.santacruzmuseum.org/ 

http://www.jstantonphotography.com/-home.html 

https://www2.whoi.edu/site/nosams/ 

#Paleontologist, #paleontology,  #SantaCruz, #Monterey, #santacruzcounty, #mitigation, #mitigationpaleontology, #pacificpaleontology, @pacificpaleontology, #fossil, #fossilhunting, #fieldwork, #santacruzmuseum, #MontereyBay, #SCMNH, #universityofcaliforniamuseumofpaleontology, #UCMP, #californiaacademyofscience, #academyofscience,  #ucmpberkeley, #fosssilprep, #paleo, #fossil, #fossilhunting, #Research, #fossilpreservation, #vertpaleo, #museumcuration, #collectionsmanagement, #fossilcollection, #fossilcollector, #fossilconservation, #santacruz, #Mastodon, #Proboscidean, #C-14dating, #Holocene, 

“National Fossil Day”

 

I could choose from among a wide range of amazing fossils to share for National Fossil Day and for this year there was no question which fossil I wanted to share and celebrate for its meaning. As I transition from many years in k-16 public science classrooms to many more years in business with Pacific Paleontology outside in the rock layers interacting with the fossils I love, I reflect back on the moments with my students. These moments all weld meaning onto my life, and mold who I have become with the unknowing direction my students have gifted to me. The gratitude this student expresses is beyond doubt a mutual one. This sincere fossil specimen-gift sums up the incredible joy and privilege I have had in being a science teacher so well and the beauty of the rock, the ink, the physical distance the specimen has traveled to get here, and the obvious love that my student had for this fossil. It is such a great symbol for me of the mutual gratitude that students and teachers share together in the learning process and it holds a place on my desk where I work daily as a reminder of my timeless purpose in life, beyond science, beyond fossils, teaching, and business. BTW the town of Solnhofen, Germany, is one of the most famous fossil sites in all of paleontology, home to the Solnhofen Limestone Formation, where one of the evolutionarily first fossil birds, Archaeopteryx, was first discovered. More info in the link below...

https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/mesozoic/jurassic/solnhofen.html  

“Rock Removal is About to Get a Lot Easier!”

 

When a fossil is found in the rock, paleontologists don’t actually just dig the fossil itself out of the rock but they remove it along with a block of the surrounding rock, called matrix, to later be prepared further in the lab. Like this 4 million year old ?Macoma sp. clam you see here, the matrix needs to be carefully cut back or completely removed, depending upon the fragility of the fossil.  Here you see traditional hand pick removal of the matrix, which fine-tunes the block for later compact storage in a public museum!  That method is about to be augmented with pneumatic help.

With our new small business development grant I’ll be purchasing two new air scribes; the “Velociraptor Mark II” and the “T. rex” from Zoic Palaeotech.  I’ve wanted air scribes for quite awhile, but have never been able to afford them for prep work until now!  Looking forward to upping my prep game now that my business is off the ground.

zoicpaleotech.com/ 

“A Good Week for Business, and More”

 

I am pleased to announce that “Pacific Paleontology”, our new paleontological mitigation venture, has been chosen to receive a $5000.00 U.S. Small Business Administration Dream Fund Grant! The grant will be used to buy essential equipment that is needed to effectively preserve and archive fossil discoveries made at local construction sites here in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties! 

And on a related note, Pacific Paleontology received its first contract this week to monitor a small subdivision project right here in Scotts Valley, Santa Cruz County! The site is literally right around the corner from our house and will be excavating down into the very same layer of rock that got me involved in paleontology all those decades ago as a boy roaming the hills around my home; the Santa Margarita Formation. This layer of unconsolidated sands and gravels is widespread throughout central and southern California and hosts an extremely rich and well-known Miocene (12-15mya) marine fauna. I am looking forward to pinning that first dollar bill in my prep lab very soon! 

And in other related news I have been invited to the Digitization Academy with iDigBio as the Paleontological Collections Advisor for the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. There is a big push today in natural history museums to make their collections available digitally on the web for the wider scientific community to access. My classmates come from institutions in a global community; Africa, South America, Europe, etc., who are making natural history collections available worldwide. So researchers from anywhere in the world who would like to study the fossils in our museum’s collections can login to see photos and other data on the specimens representing the evolutionary history of life in the Monterey Bay! It really is phenomenally exciting to be a part of helping to make that piece happen for our museum and our community.  Super exciting!

https://calosba.ca.gov/funding-grants-incentives/california-dream-fund-program/ 

https://research.nhm.org/ip/santa-margarita-formation/

https://www.idigbio.org/content/introduction-biodiversity-specimen-digitization-2

https://www.scottsvalley.org/

#CaliforniaDreamFund, #SantaCruzMuseumOfNaturalHistory, #SCMNH, #Collections, #PaleontologyCollections, #Museum, #SpecimenDigitization, #NaturalHistoryCollections, #iDigBio, #Paleontologist, #paleontology,  #SantaCruz, #Monterey, #santacruzcounty, #mitigation, #mitigationpaleontology, #pacificpaleontology, @pacificpaleontology,