Today: a few photos of neat stuff from the Sternberg Museum of Hays, Kansas. These are from my first time through Hays this summer, in June. It's worth a stop. Some of these are from their permanant collection, and some from a travelling exhibit of fossil reconstructions called "T. Rexcetera."

Archelon, mega turtle of the Western Interior Seaway


Pterosaur -- the flying Chihuahua of its day


Plesiosaur (I like how fierce this one looks, and the contrast in colors between its teeth and its bones -- reminds me of the Joker in the Batman movies...)


Big honkin' mosasaur skull (Tylosaurus? I should have taken better notes...)


Yipes! Under the Sternberg's dome, there are reconstructed beasties...


Beautiful slab of Uintacrinus, a stalkless crinoid (more here)


I think this last one is so beautiful that I just switched my desktop background image to it (from the previous image, a geologic map of the Moon).

Labels: chalk, cretaceous, fossils, kansas

Here's a quick recap of my cross-country journey, for those who are interested in such things.

I left Bozeman on Saturday morning, July 26, and drove east on the Interstate to Billings, then diverged southeast towards Little Bighorn. There, I verified a comment from a Lakota friend at MSU that with my new bushy mustache (see change in icon above), I look a wee big like George Armstrong Custer (Custer & his men were killed by Lakota and/or Cheyenne warriors). After a short picnic there, I kept driving across southeast Montana, and into northeast Wyoming. My goal for the night was Devils Tower, where I have positive memories from my "North by Northwesty" roadtrip two years ago. I got to Devils Tower in mid-afternoon, just in time for a wicked-looking thunderstorm to roll in. Pendulous looking mammatus clouds were hanging down, and the skies turned a darker grey than Lola. Rain and wind came through, and a big dead branch from one of the cottonwoods in the campground came crashing down, but not on anyone's car or tent. When the skies cleared up, I drove up to the visitor's center and took a walk around the tower. It's awesome: massive columns, some of them twenty feet across. The rock is a porphyritic phonolite, and it's quite pretty to look at: big feldspars (5mm) set in a fine-grained grey matrix. Lovely.

The next morning (Sunday), I headed for Red Bird, Wyoming (along Wyoming's eastern border), where Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway suggested there would be oodles of ammonites in concretions in the Pierre Shale, some a foot across. When I visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science earlier this summer, Kirk Johnson reiterated to me that Red Bird was the place to go for ammonites. But once I got to where Red Bird should be (according to my road atlas), there were no highway signs indicating that the town existed. Worse, there were no outcrops, and no sign of public land. (And one thing that an amateur fossil collector does not want to do in Wyoming is trespass on a rancher's land.) So, no Red Bird ammonites for me. Oh well, no worries: I had collected ammonites from a tongue of the Pierre Shale (the Bearpaw Shale) earlier in the summer on BLM land near Glendive, Montana, and scored some good specimens there. I cruised south, stopping at the Sierra Trading Post outlet in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and dropping some cash on some new duds (STP is mainly a catalog business, famous ten years ago for their amazing deals, but the company seems to be shifting to more mainstream business nowadays, including multiple brick-and-mortar locations). Then another hour on the road brought me to Fort Collins, to the house of Larry Wiseman, where I stayed earlier in my trip. He and I got some pizza and 90-Shilling Ale (Odell's) and traded tales about our summers.


The next morning, we had coffee on Larry's front porch and watch the sun rise. I packed up and hit the road, heading for Kansas. In my rear-view mirror, the Rockies shrank and vanished from sight, a melancholy fade. Out into the plains... In mid-afternoon, I rolled into Oakley, Kansas, where I headed for the Fick Museum. The Fick Museum is interesting on multiple levels: it's got some stellar fossils from Kansas's Smoky Hill Chalk (member of the Niobrara Formation), like a Xiphactinus (massive fish) and a Tylosaurus skull (even more massive mosasaur). But it's also got some whacked-out art: the founder, Vi Fick, was into making art with local "art supplies," and so the walls show his portraits of eagles rendered entirely in rattlesnake tails (see image at right, from this online gallery), or his geometric arrangements of thousands of fossil shark teeth. There's even an oil painting Fick did of "God making the Cretaceous seas," which shows a bearded diety surrounded by flames (it kind of reminded me of Hindu art) making pleisiosaurs and pterosaurs. Not the usual way you see fossils displayed, or paleontology depicted!

At the Fick Museum, I met up with Ron Schott, doyen of the geoblogosphere, who graciously agreed to show me some cool Kansas geology. Ron and I headed south from Oakley towards Monument Rocks, an outcrop of the Smoky Hill Chalk. Ron was eager to gigapan the outcrop, and he set up the little device: essentially a robot that directs his camera to take high-resolution photos in a systematic grid. Pretty cool, really -- I guess I hadn't realized what a Gigapan really was before seeing it in action. I got to meet Ron's two little plastic elves that he uses for scale, and personally placed them on a ledge of chalk for the photograph. The grid of pictures eventually gets digitally stitched together by software, and available for sharing online.

From there, Ron and I headed back up to Oakley, stopping en route so I could collect a couple samples of the aquiferiferous Ogallala Formation, and then headed east, then south again, towards Castle Rock, another chalk outcrop. Here, we tested out my Prius' shocks on the dirt tracks, and checked out the largest cliff in Kansas (nearly getting blown off it by the intense wind), and then prospected for fossils below. I found some fish scales, and a shark tooth! Also inoceramid clam fragments, encrusted with oysters (apparently a common feature of the bottom of the Western Interior Seaway). No mosasaurs, though... Back to the road, and into Hays, Kansas, where Ron put me up in his guest room. We had dinner and a few beers at the Lb. Brewing Company, and thought about recording a PodClast, but then it slipped our minds. We discussed field trips, tenure, publications, and related topics. A good time! Thanks again to Ron for being such an excellent host.

The next two days (Tuesday and Wednesday) were essentially just driving. On Tuesday, I made it to Indianapolis, Indiana, and spent the night in a hotel there. On Wednesday, I turned north, and drove up into Michigan, and crossed into Ontario at Port Huron / Sarnia. Why go to Canada on my way from Montana to DC? Well, I'm teaching my Snowball Earth class this week at NOVA, and some of the rock samples I needed were stuck at Brock University in St. Catherines, Ontario. Usually they get shipped to educators who want to use them, but because of alleged border complications, I had to go get them myself; a five hundred mile detour! Fortunately, I have good friends who leave in Waterloo, Ontario, so I went and stayed with them. Mike and Natalie Leuty have been friends since 1996, and we had a good evening catching up. They have a sweet house in a suburb full of professorial types who teach at one of the several universities in town.

On Thursday morning, Mike and I had coffee on his front porch while his kids played in the yard, and then I packed up my kit and got rolling. I made it to Brock by 11am, and got the Snowball Suite. Because it's in a giant black case that looks suspiciously like a rifle case, I packed it under a pile of other gear in my car. At any rate, I crossed back into the United States without any static from customs officials, and rolled through Buffalo, New York (twice in one year!) I made my destination for the night Ithaca, New York, where I have a friend who's going to grad school at Cornell. I've never been to Ithaca, but I hear that it's "gorges" from many people. So I called my friend, Kathryn Werntz, and she was indeed around and accepting visitors, so I drove through the finger lakes region (five subparallel glacial troughs now filled with water), and found my way to her bungalow. Kathryn and I took a walk through Cornell's campus (two amazing gorges cutting through it), had some Indian food, and went to get dessert at Purity Ice Cream.

In the morning (Friday), I got up and we went to Gimme! Coffee for some caffeine. Thus fortified, I hit the road for my final day of driving. East to I-81, then south through Pennsylvania. At Harrisburg, I turned onto I-83, which took me to Baltimore, and from there it was a familiar zoom down the B-W Parkway into northeast DC. The dome of the Captiol was visible to my left, and then the comfortable sights of Florida Avenue and U Street. Up the hill, and a left on Harvard Street, and I was back in Adams-Morgan. Home! Finally!

Labels: appalachians, canada, chalk, colorado, field trips, glacial landforms, kansas, montana, national parks, new york, snowball earth, structure, travel, wyoming

I just got an e-mail from Alan Watson, of Belfast, who read my article in Geotimes about geological travels in Northern Ireland. (This was one of my first topics on this blog, so newcomers may be interested in revisiting some of those old posts in the December and January archives.)

Anyhow, Alan clued me in to a new series from the BBC called "Blueprint," wherein they examine the natural history of the Emerald Isle. There's a cool interactive aspect to the website where you get a map of Ireland and a choice between "Plants/Animals," "Humans," and "Land." Choose "Land" and then select what you want to learn more about. Then you get a series of images, conversations, or videos about different aspects of Northern Ireland's geologic history. It's pretty cool -- there's a really enthusiastic dude (William Crawley) talking about the eruption of the Giant's Causeway, and also examinations of "the Chalk," graptolites, and granite gneiss. They even mention the Iapetus Ocean! (Which was a big focus of the field trip I led today!)

Labels: chalk, giants causeway, northern ireland, websites

Geological Travels in Northern Ireland, Part VII:

Ground moraine being used (quite appropriately) as a golf course, east of Port Rush.

An old quarry south of the road between Bushmills and Port Rush. This is easily accessible from the parking area for White Rocks, a popular surfing beach. (Yes, they surf in December in Northern Ireland!)

Well-exposed here is the unconformity between the Cretaceous-aged "Chalk" (the Ulster White Limestone) and the overlying "Lower" Basalts (Paleogene in age).

The ancient topography is revealed in the undulations of the unconformity surface: prominently featured here is an ancient valley that was topped off with basaltic lava during the eruption. Valley depth in this photo is about 80 feet.

The limestone ("Chalk") here was quarried for lime. Lime is the binding agent in cement and mortar, and it is produced from the burning of limestone. Disused kilns from the burning process were still situated in the quarry. The area was lousy with flint nodules, like the one here. I collected a beautiful one that looked like a cross between a sausage and a powdered donut, but security confiscated it from my carry-on luggage on my flight back home.

Labels: antrim coast, basalt, chalk, flint, geology, glacial landforms, northern ireland

Geological travels in Northern Ireland, part III:

After a brunch in the village of Moira with my old friend Andrew and his newly pregnant wife Nadine, Casey and I drove up the coast of County Antrim. Her friend Jodie had loaned us her Audi and arranged for us to stay at a condo in Port Rush. Road trip!

This is the view south from an area called Garron Point.




I stopped and poked around amongst the boulders on the shore. Note the boulders are two colors: black basalt and the white chalk.








Here's my friend Casey staring out across the North Channel at the Mull of Kintyre (Scotland), only 12 miles distant at the closest point.









Awesome, awesome, awesome. There's so much going on in this picture, I don't know where to start! Very prominent (and annotated with a dotted line) is the contact between the light-colored chalk and the overlying dark-colored basalt. This chalk layer is really a white limestone at this locality. Unlike the same layer where it famously outcrops at Dover (England), here the chalk has been compressed by heavy overlying lava flows. These basalt layers are called "lower" because they are the bottom of a three-part stack of igneous eruptions. The layers are all tilted here at Garron Point because they have slumped: large blocks of strata have slipped downward and outward, sliding along an underlying clay layer, the Lias. Conveniently, the Lias is Triassic in age, the overlying chalk is Cretaceous, and the basalts here are Paleogene: one formation per period. It's worth noting that the word "Cretaceous" itself comes from the Latin word creta, or "chalk." The entire Cretaceous period is named for this brilliant white layer of rock, which also extends across southern Britain and into France. This chalk is made up of gazillions of little coccolithophores, like I mentioned in an earlier post about ocean acidification.

Here's an image from a tourist sign at Garron Point which may make the geology a bit clearer. Note the sketch in the upper right of the slumped blocks.





Large grey nodules of flint that are present in the chalk exposed at Garron Point. These nodules probably form diagenetically -- after the sediment is deposited and the component bits were organizing themselves into rock. Smaller bits of silica (possibly from siliceous sponge spicules) dissolved and reprecipitated in these concentric nodules. Flint breaks conchoidally, like glass, and so these nodules were a terrific local source of arrowhead & axe tools for Stone Age peoples in Ireland. Pound coin for scale.

Lastly, here's a shot of sunset from the Torr Road, which is a crazy twisty little road that runs along the northeastern Northern Irish coast.

Labels: antrim coast, basalt, chalk, northern ireland, travel