Yesterday my field assistant Katherine and I began our Ordovician adventure. We left Riverside and headed up to Ely, NV - a wild west town if there ever was one. On our way, we passed through Sin City and skirted the NV-375, the Extraterrestrial Highway, which runs through central Nevada and past Area51. Here's some documentation:
I'm excited to begin the actual field work, which will take place out in the Ibex region of the Great Basin, in Utah. I'm going to be studying aspects of the Ordovician Radiation by examining the diversity of gastropods and bivalves through a Middle Ordovician succession of rocks.
Here's the non-paleontologist description: Life in the oceans experienced a major radiation during the Ordovician period (roughly 480-440 million years ago). I'm going to study this radiation event by collecting fossils of ancient snails and clams preserved in rocks in Utah, which was equatorial beachfront property during the Ordovician. I'm also going to try to reconstruct what the overall environments and ecosystems that these clams and snails looked like, in order to better understand how marine ecosystems have changed through time. The ocean looked a lot different back then but understand the ancient systems can help us better understand modern ocean ecosystems.
Here are some more photos!
This is Katherine checking out the menu of a surprisingly good Chinese restaurant in Ely, NV.
This is the wonderful Hotel Nevada, where we stayed last night.
We're going to be camping way out in the middle of nowhere by the outcrops so we won't have an cell phone or internet service, but we'll be heading into town once a week for showers and resupplies. I'll update the blog and my flickr photos as often as possible. You can check out the flickr photos here.
I also made a google map of the field localities, which you can check out here.
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