“Giant Rockfall”

https://youtu.be/iJFcIhAAy8I 

Here is a rockfall from 2021 that is a part of my Rockfall Dynamics study site that reveals numerous storm events along with the fossilized creatures that are associated with them. I have been studying and documenting these rockfalls now for several decades and have identified a number of causal factors and numerous patterns and processes involving the coastal geology of this area of Monterey Bay. This study is revealing several never-before documented geological processes involved with coastal rockfall dynamics in active continental margins. In a couple of cases I have been able to reinforce my understanding by accurately predicting events and I hope to be able to eventually make novel non-invasive mitigation recommendations once I have enough longitudinal data.  

#Paleontologist, #paleontology,  #SantaCruz, #Monterey, #santacruzcounty, #mitigation, #mitigationpaleontology, #pacificpaleontology, @pacificpaleontology, #beachfossils, #fossil, #fossilhunting, #fieldwork, #beachcombing, #santacruzmuseum, #MontereyBay, #SCMNH, #universityofcaliforniamuseumofpaleontology, #UCMP, #californiaacademyofscience, #academyofscience,  #ucmpberkeley, #LACMIP, #NHMLA, #Rockfalls, #Coastalerosion, #Dynamiccoast, #Landslide, #Stratigraphy, #GeologicalProcesses, #Geology, #FossilFriday. 

30 seconds of relaxation with Chacky

30 seconds of relaxation with Chacky 

“Pacific Paleontology Recognized by the California Small Business Develpment Center, SBDC”

https://calcoastalsbdc.com/success-stories/pacific-paleontology-papa 

I am pleased to announce that Pacific Paleontology has been chosen to be featured by the California Small Business Development Center as a Developing Success Story!  I could not be more pleased by this recognition for all our hard work that we have been doing over the past year!  The CalCoastalSBDC, the central California arm of the statewide organization, has been instrumental in our successes so far, in addition to helping our firm successfully acquire a $5,000.00 startup grant from the state!  With these funds we have been able to purchase much-needed equipment to fill important gaps in our collecting, prepping, and archiving abilities as well as onboard essential business insurance.  Here you can see some of the field and lab equipment used to extract and prepare the fossils.  Large new acquisitions from the British firm Zoic for our “Velociraptor” and “TRex” laboratory air scribes and from Eastwing and Zog for our field hand tools.  And of course big shoutouts to @Austin Hendy, @Charles L Powell, @Bobby Boessenecker, #lacmip, #santacruzmuseum, #ucmp, the #californiaacademyofsciences, and so many others for their ongoing instrumental support.

#Paleontologist, #paleontology,  #SantaCruz, #Monterey, #santacruzcounty, #mitigation, #mitigationpaleontology, #pacificpaleontology, @pacificpaleontology, #fossil, #fossilhunting, #fieldwork, #santacruzmuseum, #MontereyBay, #SCMNH, #universityofcaliforniamuseumofpaleontology, #UCMP, #californiaacademyofscience, #academyofscience, #ucmpberkeley, #LACMIP, #NHMLA, #Monterey, #fosssilprep, #paleo, #montereycounty, #fossil, #Constructionsite, #fossilhunting,

“PALEO PUPS; THE OUTCROP DOGS”

 

Pups and Paleo have a long long history together!  Having a good dog or two along on a paleo dig makes the whole experience come alive, so to speak, and sets the tone for a wonderful time for all.  Pups in paleo go back into antiquity from Mary Anning in the 18th century to Mary Leakey in the 19th.  Anning, one of the most famous paleontologists in all of history, would regularly take her dog Tray along with her on fossil-hunting expeditions to the English seashore in search of extinct marine reptiles and other creatures.  I can only imagine that Tray was named after one of Anning’s trays of fossils!  Unfortunately, Tray met his fate with a seashore rockfall, something I know won’t befall Chaco or Yoshi because of what happened 46 years earlier.  

In 1976 fate nearly intervened and took the life of my paleo pup Blackie and I when I was 16; a rockfall came down besides us both, shaking the ground, and my nerves, to this very day and making me once cautious for the rest of my life.  Mary Leakey too would regularly travel with her dalmations on her expeditions in search of the ancestors of our own human lineage.  In fact, on July 17th, 1959, Mary’s dalmations were with her when they discovered the famous Zinj, later scientifically named as Paranthropus boisei. 

More recently, Jon Gopsill and his trusted paleo pups Poppy and Sam were on Stolford beach, England, around Christmas time when the pups discovered a nearly complete 190 million year old ichthyosaur skeleton!  And today, on most every paleo dig except contract gigs on construction sites, one can expect to see these two digging-est dogs, Chaco and Yoshi, onsite helping PaPa with sniffing out bones and other fossils, digging, deterring poachers (or attracting them as the case may be), and general paleontological support.  In addition to being my paleo pup support crew, they can mostly be found chasing each other, slobbering, pooping, eating sea weed, chewing driftwood, exploring, swimming in the ocean and chasing other dogs to play.

Included here in memoriam; The Blarb or Palo, our yellow lab, and Blackie, my black lab who were faithful paleo pups of ages gone by.  Also let’s not forget our supportive paleo cats; my cat Singkoo shown here on my paleo desk in 1975 along with my fossil ledger and old Royal report typewriter.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/paleo-pets-make-fossil-hunting-less-lonely-180959749/#comment-6027347149 

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-51031114 

https://youtu.be/8RWaKO6qvcc 

#paleopups, #Paleontologist, #paleontology,  #SantaCruz, #Monterey, #santacruzcounty, #mitigation, #mitigationpaleontology, #pacificpaleontology, @pacificpaleontology, #beachfossils, #fossil, #fossilhunting, #fieldwork, #beachcombing, #santacruzmuseum, #MontereyBay, #SCMNH, 

 “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