SURF Experiences Summer 2011

I am a little late with this blog, however I recently went to Lawson, Oklahoma a couple weeks ago for my research.  This was not originally planned when I first started my project, however it seemed to be a great resource in terms of getting new specimens in which I could prepare myself. We drove out on Friday (was a very long drive, about 16 hours!!) and on Saturday we got up bright and early and went to the Dolese Bros. Quarry.  The Vice President of the company and the Superintendent of the quarry assisted us and showed us where the best places to find our permian fossils would potentially be. Working started early since the temperatures in Oklahoma this summer have been highs of 112 degrees.

We started out slow, finding a leg bone or skull fragment here and there, but eventually we hit the motherload. We started finding vertebrate, squamosal, femur, humeri, etc. These were all found in the rock pile across from where we had began looking around. The superintendent of the quarry who was helping us, had the best find of the day…a fully in tact vertebrate of what we think may have belonged to Seymouria, which lived long before the dinosaurs and was a small reptile that roamed the Richards Spur locality. The piece is very remarkable and it was an exciting find for us all.

After a rewarding day, we found it was well worth enduring the heat and the 16 hour car ride. We ventured over to the Sam Noble Museum later in the afternoon, which we found quite impressive.  They had great geology and paleontology exhibits for all to enjoy. We also were eager to see the display on the Richards Spur locality. It was really well put together and we were intrigued at what the site we are researching used to look like during the Permian period. It is not the dry, dusty limestone quarry that we see today and the display showed the fissures, species, and bedrock in a remake of its original, ancient habitat.  At the end of the day, it was nice to know we were going back to Wisconsin with some quarry contacts, a good experience, and lots of bulk sample and preserved bones to sort through and prepare. I am looking forward to a busy semester preparing and sharing what I have found!

My apologies for taking so long for my first blog entry! However, I do have some nice pictures to share with you from the infamous Field Museum located in Chicago. (Which I highly recommend to visit if you need something fun to do this summer- whether you like science or not!)

We started the day off early today- of course the great traffic of Chicago delayed us a little. Rex and I got to go “behind the scenes” at the museum with the guidance of Bill Simpson, who is in charge of all the fossil vertebrate collections. We were lead to a room with rows of tall cabinets full of fossils of numerous reptiles. The one we were interested in was the collection labeled: Richards Spur, OK.

These past couple weeks I have been delving into science journals published on the Richards Spur locality in Oklahoma, which is a sight of great preservation of terrestrial vertebrate species before the Permian mass extinction (which wiped out 70% of terrestrial life). In the next few moments in the reptilian fossil room, we were surprised at what we found. It is true that the Richards Spur locality is an area of outstanding preservation of these fossils, but we didn’t know on what scale. The Field Museum had loads and loads of cataloged data, as well as uncataloged (below).

We began counting some of the uncataloged fossils, but it would take years and years to sort through some of the sediment to uncover these tiny fossils. In paleo, fossil elements are counted in two ways: NISP (number of individual species) and MNI (minimum number of individuals). Lets say you have 1 right femur, 2 skulls, and 3 vertebrae that you find in a quarry. Your NISP would be the total of all elements, which in this case is 6. This technique assumes there were 6 total individuals that were found. The next technique called MNI, would say there were a total of 2 individuals found. This is because you could assume the femur and vertebrae are all from the same species, but there obviously can’t be two skulls for one specimen. This is the data we hoped to collect from the collections that the Field Museum held. We decided that dealing with the cataloged specimens would be our focus.

Below is a picture of a skull and articulated foot from a small reptile that dwelled during the Permian in Oklahoma called the Captorhinus.

More museums to visit and a trip to Oklahoma is planned in August to get more data on creatures like this little guy!

Of course, I had to conclude with a picture of me and the creature of my choice…Sue!