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Hello all- Time to announce the 27th annual Tate Field Conference! Happening here in Casper, Wyoming on June 2-4. I would love to see some Forum members show up. Here is the info.... (We are going fully live, no online presentations or attendees). We hope you'll join us for the 27th Annual Tate Conference, "The Triassic: Gateway to the Mesozoic," June 2nd - 4th at the Tate Geological Museum. The conference features a day of speakers (Saturday June 3) and two days of field trips (June 2 and 4). Saturday evening includes a dinner and guest keynote speaker, Hans Sues of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. He will be speaking on new and exciting finds from the Triassic of Germany. We also have great field trips planned: Friday June 2… 33-Mile Road This trip will take us to the Triassic deposits on 33-Mile Road northwest of Casper in the area of the Red Wall. A site was found here in on July 7 1977, which led to the discovery of the type specimen of Heptasuchus. Crews from the University of Wisconsin (and others) have been exploring this area more recently. Aaron Kufner of UW Madison will lead the portion of this trip to a site the UW teams found and have been collecting nearby. We may do some surface collecting at the Heptasuchus site (officially called the Clarke Locality) as well. This trip is on BLM land, and done with permission of the BLM. Personal collecting of vertebrate fossils is not allowed on BLM land, so all fossils (including fragments) collected will be collected for the University of Wisconsin collections. This is also a sage grouse lekking and nesting area. If we run into sage grouse nests, we are to keep our distance and report the nest. Sunday June 4… Little Red Creek This trip will be an exploration of the Alcova Limestone. The Alcova Limestone was possibly deposited in a lagoonal situation and has produced one taxon of fossil vertebrate, the sauropterygian, Corosaurus alcovensis. Remains of this animal are only found in Natrona County, southwest of Casper (so far). We will be exploring a new area that presumably has not been explored for Corosaurus bones, or at least not since the 1980’s. The bones occur in resistant limestone best found on talus slopes, so this trip will incur some more difficult walking on steep slopes. This trip is on BLM land, and done with permission of the BLM. Personal collecting of vertebrate fossils is not allowed on BLM land, so all fossils (including fragments) collected will be collected for the Tate Museum collections under permit number PA10-WY -191. You can learn more about the talks and register online (or download a registration form) here https://www.caspercollege.edu/tate.../events/conference/

The Trip That Nearly Didn't Start (Lengthy image-intensive trip report follows) Tammy and I had planned a fossil hunting trip to Wyoming for the third week of September to redeem our day of digging (splitting rock) at the Green River Formation quarry that @sseth had earlier so generously offered up as a prize on an auction to benefit TFF. We had our airfares, a rental car reserved, and a series of hotels booked across the state ready for a monumental fossil hunting trip. The one small problem was the not so small storm named Hurricane Irma that tore through the northern Caribbean and had its sights set on the Florida and being wider than the peninsula, no Floridian was going to miss the effects of this storm. Earlier in the week the forecast had the centerline of the cone of probability for the track of the storm hitting Miami and traveling up the eastern coast where Boca Raton sat squarely in the cross-hairs. I guess that if you are going to be in the path of some major destruction it is better to be the target early in the week rather that toward the end when the storm is at our doorstep. Thankfully (for us, but not so for those in the Lower Keys and Southwest Florida), the storm's turn to the north was delayed and though we were now on the stronger NE quadrant of the storm, the eye was significantly far away to the west that we escaped the strongest of winds. The storm unleashed squadrons of tornadoes and micro-bursts which had us ducking into our safe room for cover. During the storm unidirectional winds first blew from the east and then from the south as the storm passed us to the west but the tornadic winds were something else as the trees started whipping around in all directions quite violently. Luckily for us, the house survived with no structural damage. The newer more sturdy pool cage that replaced the original one that Wilma had crumpled and stuffed into the pool back in 2005 (shockingly) did not even lose a single screen panel. The damage on our property was limited to toppled trees and broken limbs and branches. We lost power even before the eye wall had made first landfall in the Florida Keys. As soon as it was safe to go outside, we started the portable generator and ran extension cords throughout the house to keep refrigerator, freezer and a box fan and a few lights powered. We've cooked on our outdoor grill and Coleman camp stove in previous power outages caused by the rash of hurricanes in 2004/05 and so we were well prepared and never at risk of starvation (we actually ate rather well). While Wilma had run over the house in late October, 2005 when the temperatures had cooled somewhat from the hot muggy Florida summer, we were not so lucky this time. Outdoor temps in the low 90's were soon matched by the 88 degrees inside which made sleeping difficult (even with a fan). We spent the days cutting up the downed foliage and stacking it into many piles along the street in back of the house as well as a towering mount in the cul-de-sac in front (which is still growing in size to this day and is due to be cleared by FEMA sometime in the next 2-3 weeks). Taking frequent breaks inside to lay down on the floor in front of the fan to avoid all-out heat exhaustion, both Tammy and I worked to clear the property as much as we could and monitor the progress of power restoration in our county. Over 70% of homes and businesses were left in the dark after Irma but Florida Power & Light had learned a few things after performing poorly in the 2004/05 hurricane seasons. They had staged a bunch of replacement parts and crews fresh from working in Houston were in the state working to get the grid back online. We couldn't leave on our trip unless we got power back and we watched the percentage of customers without power slowly but steadily decrease until one evening our power flickered and within a few minutes was restored for good. I had been waiting till the last possible minute to cancel my plans and try to get refunds for the reservations we'd made for this trip. I was tired of a week of hot sweaty yard work clearing debris and I was ready for some cooler Wyoming temps.