Landfill paleontology! Trip to the Chinle Formation, northern Arizona

[Benjamin Mohler]

Hi everyone!

 

 

I recently uploaded a pair of expedition videos to YouTube from my September trip to some late Triassic beds in northern Arizona. If you're an old school Walking With Dinosaurs fan, you may be interested to know that this spot is quite close geographically to the famed Placerias Quarry whose fossils were hugely influential in the making of Episode 1, "New Blood". I, and I suspect many of you as well, found WWD and its spinoffs to be easily the most captivating natural history documentaries of their time, and I credit its opening act taking place in my home state as playing an influential role in why I ended up in this field of study. I spend more of my time these days working in Cretaceous rocks than anything else, so coming back to the Triassic is something of a homecoming for me.

 

 

Fossils at this locality are abundant but frequently in rough shape, since they begin to erode and fragment while still several inches below the surface. Teeth, like the phytosaur crown above, hold up better and are usually among the best finds of each trip. I also collected some fragments of metoposaur skull or clavicle (watch the second video in particular if you're interested in these guys!) but I will hold off until I've finished gluing the pieces together before sharing here. 😉

 

 

While large stretches of Chinle beds in northern Arizona are now federally protected under Petrified Forest National Park, these protected areas do not extend over the entirety of Arizona's late Triassic province. A short walk away from where I collected fossils is this massive excavated pit that has cut down through the fossil-bearing layers. This burial site of over 200 million years will soon become a landfill for human waste.

 

I think this is an important reminder of why we collect fossils in the first place: 'everything not saved will be lost'. 

[PaleoNoel]

Awesome site & good looking tooth! Triassic material is super interesting.