Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Coal Tracks

These are really common around Price, Utah. As it was and still is to some extent a mining town, they are commonly found by miners while they are working.

 These are from the Blackhawk formation, which represents the Upper Cretaceous. When the animals were walking in the swamp, they would have made deep holes in the plant matter that would eventually become coal.

 The holes (tracks) were then filled in with sediment that washed in during a flooding event before they could fill back in with the coal. Leaves and coalified logs are also common, giving an idea of what the paleoecology was like at that point.

 These are commonly collected because they aren't made of solid coal and thus aren't profitable to the owners of the mine. 

Sometimes, so many animals walked in the same place that the tracks overlapped, so it can be hard to distinguish them. That said, sauropods, therapods, and ornithopods are all represented by these tracks. The ones that don't overlap, and those that do, are beautifully preserved. Someday, I'd like to find a picture of them in the roof of the mines, as its no longer safe to go into most of them to look.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

My Story (Very briefly...)

Lots of people claim that they wanted to be paleontologists at the age of 3. So did I. The problem is, I never really grew out of it. My third birthday party had dinosaurs. Everywhere. I grew up digging in fossil dirt from Aurora, NC, looking for coral and shark teeth. I practically lived at my local science museums (and still do, only now I get to do research, fossil preparation, and work in collections!) When local paleontologists discovered a dinosaur with a "fossilized heart" (no longer considered such) when I was little, I got to meet the man who led the work. And then, years later a dinosaur bone with soft tissue turned up. I was officially hooked.
No longer was I dreaming about dinosaurs. I was actively pursuing the science behind prehistoric creatures. I didn't want to read about it, I wanted in on the action. So I started working at the museum, and finally going on my own adventures. And thus, I needed a place to share them and maybe inspire others the way I was inspired. I have gone from watching fossils be prepared from one side of the glass at the museum to working on them on the inside of the glass. I am a student working toward my goal. I can finally start to call myself a paleontologist.