Paleontology and Paleo Lab Class Trip
Ethan Shirley and Hadeel Saad led this winter’s Paleontology and Paleo Lab Class Trip on April 12-13, and were joined by undergraduate students Jonathan Sarasa, Yousef Emara, Micah Romero, Shea Bisson, Ollie Lamb, Andy Armstrong. The objective was to travel through time, exploring the sequence of Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, and Carboniferous units around Ann Arbor.
Their trip began driving west, to the Blue Ridge Esker in Jackson, where glacial deposits contain reworked sediments from the Traverse Group Devonian limestones (~ 400Ma) and the Mississippian Marshall Sandstone (~ 340Ma). Students examined the Borden Gp. Mississippian limestones at Crinoid Mound near Bloomington, IN and passed through the Racoon Creek Group Pennsylvanian (~ 300Ma), observing numerous plant fossils. They finally reached the Devonian reef rocks at Falls of the Ohio State Park across the river from Louisville, KY, and camped at Clifty Falls State Park in the midst of Silurian (440Ma) limestone cliffs.
On day 2, they visited the Silurian Louisville and Brassfield Limestone and Waldron Shale near Tunnel Mill. Their day ended collecting collected crinoids, trilobites, bryozoans, and other Ordovician fossils at a roadcut south of Richmond, IN and in Caesar's Creek Spillway near Dayton, OH. Some of the fossils collected on these trips are donated to the Museum and will become student research work, including material from the Marshall Sandstone that resulted in a Museum Contributions paper earlier this year!
Graduate Student Fieldtrips
Graduate students also visited Grand Ledge, MI where the Pennsylvanian Saginaw and Gran River Formations crop out, yielding abundant plant fossils of past tropical swamp vegetation. Many of these include molds of large tree trunks and the rooting systems of Calamites and Sigillaria, extinct relatives of horsetails and clubmosses, respectively.
The Friedman Lab, represented by Hadeel, Rafa, Zach and James visited an abandoned mine shaft in search for Mississippian, Michigan Fm fish fossils, in Grand Rapids, MI.
