Wyoming is an excellent place to learn about how ancient ecology compares to modern times. Because of the frequency and quality of fossil-bearing outcrops, prehistoric life and conditions can be interpreted with accuracy, painting a detailed picture of how the landscape has changed over time. One of our first lessons exploring deep-time was an analysis…
Category: Wyoming Spring Creek Field Studies
Wyoming Spring Creek- The Land Before Time
How do you look into the past? This has been a question that scientists, historians, and everyone in between have been looking to answer since we started keeping time. Many fantastical ideas have been suggested by media, whether it be cloning the dinosaurs and setting them up in a theme park or using a time…
Wyoming Spring Creek – Dead Stuff in Rocks
I’ll be honest, I have always thought sedimentary rocks were the most boring. Everybody loves looking at the pretty crystals and banding patterns of igneous and metamorphic rocks, but they don’t really have much of a story to tell besides some wacky temperature and pressure conditions. As I spend more time in Wyoming I feel…
Wyoming Spring Creek – Working Backwards
Last week, the class was working backwards – we visited a field of cow bones and considered evidence to try and decide how they got there. The exercise was designed to get us thinking about taphonomy, the state of remains as they enter and exist in the fossil record. It explains why so few fossils…
Wyoming Spring Creek: Piecing Together the Past
Ecology is first and foremost a science based upon observation. Environments biotic and abiotic factors are copiously described in detail, organismal behavioral relationships are watched and recorded, surveys are designed to count biodiversity and abundance, and individuals are analyzed and marked to gather data on community health and watch populations into the future. All of…
Spring Creek Week 3: How Rocks Tell A Story of the Past, Present, & Future
The Earth has been around for roughly 4.5 billion years, but humans have only existed for 300,000 of those years (0.007% of the planet’s history.) Our time here is so minuscule in the grand scheme of things, yet our species has developed enough to spend our current time diving into the rich history of things…
Wyoming Spring Creek: Tale as Old as Time
I stand at the end of eons of history, quite literally. My feet rest on the youngest layer of earth, writing the smallest sentence at the end of a never-ending encyclopedia that is the story of our world. There has been an unfathomable amount written before me and there will be an unfathomable amount after,…
Wyoming Spring Creek: Patterns Etched in Stone … and Bone
On the windblown and weathered surface of the Spring Creek Preserve, belemnites and vertebrae from dinosaurs litter the ground. It is easy to focus on the sheer wonder of finding a fossil, then another, then a cluster, transporting you back to the times of the Jurassic or the ancient seas that once covered Wyoming. To…
Interconnectivity of Ancient and Modern Ecosystems
Studying ancient ecosystems alongside modern ecosystems helps paint a broader and more historically accurate concept of how Earth functions. As a student studying ecology, geology, and paleontology for the first time on this trip, gaining a broader understanding is valuable to forming my own foundation of earth sciences. Rock formations that were created hundreds of…
Wyoming Spring Creek Week 3: Ecology
At surface value, the natural environment is already imposing. Studying it has further amplified that effect because the entirety of what we are experiencing now has existed for the entirety of Earth’s history. Observing the composition and properties of a single grain of sand or a complete biome could be made into a demandingly infinite…