As drought conditions in the northern hemisphere continue lots of things that have been buried underwater for countless years are being unveiled. In this case, it's 50 Million-Year-Old Treasures of Fossil Lake, Wyoming. Here's the story from Smithsonian Magazine.
(caption: The “dawn horse,” discovered near Kemmerer, was a two-foot-long mammal that had legs suited to running from predators and teeth suggesting a leafy diet. Lucia RM Martino & James Di Loreto / Dept. of Paleobiology, SI)
The 50 Million-Year-Old Treasures of Fossil Lake
In a forbidding Wyoming desert, scientists and fortune hunters search for the surprisingly intact remains of horses and other creatures that lived long agoSmithsonian / Richard Conniff /Photographs by Taylor Glenn
One morning in September 2003, Jim E. Tynsky was working on the tip of a ridge above a canyon in southwestern Wyoming. That point of land had become known as “Tom’s Folly” because of a previous fossil hunter’s inability to find anything in the quarry there. Tynsky wasn’t doing much better. With the season racing to its snowy end, he had little to show for a summer of hard work but the commonest sort of fish fossils. Heaps of discarded stone slabs lay around like broken pottery.
Other quarries on this ridge were known for producing extraordinarily detailed and complete fossils, all from the bottom of an ancient lake. Tynsky, the third generation of his family to eke out a living from finding fossils there, knelt down beside a slab still embedded in the ground. He chose a spot along an exposed edge and started to work at it with his chisel and his geological hammer. A fragment of stone broke away above the split. He was expecting to find fossilized fish underneath. Maybe some good ones. What caught his eye instead was a foot.
He cleared a larger area, and the fossil began to take shape as a ghostly shadow across the newly exposed stone surface. It was humpbacked, and the size of a border collie, but with details obscured by the limestone matrix, as if painted over with cake batter. “I got something really cool over here,” Tynsky called out to a helper. “Might be a turtle, I don’t know.” He cleared a bit more and saw that the ordinary cracks in the stone had miraculously spared the fossil. The helper came over to look.
“Oh my God,” he said, after a moment. “You got a horse!” He started jumping up and down. “You got a horse! You got a horse!”
The bones all looked to be intact and attached in the right order. A peculiar little hind foot seemed to be kicking off one edge of the slab. The top of its eight-inch-long skull butted up against the opposite edge. The whole thing was around two feet long, and if that sounds small, it’s because this was a “dawn horse,” from the early history of the horse lineage, when all horses were about that size.
It was clear that the animal had died in a lake: A fish that had lived, died and been fossilized at the same time seemed to be leaping over the horse’s hips. Other fish swam through its abdomen and around its hind legs. For Tynsky, a season of just scraping by had suddenly lit up in bright gold. He had a hunch that this might just be the finest fossil ever produced from the Green River Formation, a 25,000-square-mile area of Wyoming, Utah and Colorado that is celebrated for producing some of the most beautiful fossils in the world. Any natural history museum would want it. So would a lot of private collectors. With help from nearby quarry operators, Tynsky carefully lifted his prize out of the ground and hauled it down to his double-wide in the nearby town of Kemmerer.
READ FULL STORY: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/treasures-of-fossil-lake-180980544/?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email&utm_placement=newsletter
No comments:
Post a Comment