I am what you might call an amateur geologist. I took a geology course my first semester at Georgia Tech and it
sparked a lifelong interest. Our first roadtrip had a geologically-themed goal (Dinosaur National Monument) and it's
a trend we've continued with trips to places like Yellowstone, the
Bay of Fundy, the
Grand Canyon,
Rocky Mountain National Park,
the Badlands,
the Arctic Watershed,
the Black Hills,
Mammoth Cave and, most recently,
Niagara Falls. I even spend two weeks in the field in Colorado visiting
most of the major formations exposed at the surface there.
Mesozoic paleontology has fascinated me even longer (really, who isn't into dinosaurs?), but I always thought of the
Cenozoic as being rather dull. Dull, that is, until about 5 years ago
a YouTube compatriot
bought me a book by
Paul Martin
for my birthday. It really opened my eyes. Henceforth we've added
tapir fossil sites,
mammoth digs and
rhino excavations
to our destinations. So does that make me an amateur vertebrate paleontologist, too? Well, I sure liked to think so...
Well, yesterday I found a large skull fragment (pictured above) exposed in a creekbank near my house. Awesome, right?
Looking at it I could see a turtle's head, complete with nostril holes. And it was huge: 21 cm by 16 cm. The skull
wasn't fossilized, so I new it must be Cenozoic in origin (bones at the Mammoth Site in South Dakota aren't fossilized
either). I started looking up turtles and tortoises and soon realized that this skull was much bigger that any living
species. This was exciting! I started looking for vertebrate paleontologists to contact with my find. I wanted to
calculate how big this tortoise must have been so I started looking at skull/carapace ratios. There was some variation,
so I started looking at skulls to try and narrow it down to a similar species. I couldn't find any that looked like
my skull. In fact they all had single large openings for the nasal passages. Then I started to realize that I just
might be that over-excited amateur paleontologist that thinks the first bone he finds is a great discovery. There are
cattle near my house, upstream of the bank where I found the skull fragment, so I looked up cow skulls. The bone
fusion lines, eye ridges, indentations and overall shape matched. Well, maybe it matches a bison a little better, but
those were all over this area when Americans started crossing the Appalachians anyways.I was disappointed, but really
glad that I hadn't hurried to send an email off to some poor vertebrate paleontologist. I wonder how many emails they
get from yahoos like me.
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