DENVER MUSEUM OF NATURE & SCIENCE Department of Earth Sciences 2016 Year in Review Happy New Year! We are excited to continue our tradition of “year-in-review” reports. In the following pages, the curators in the department share details on the progress of our multi-year research projects in the field and in the lab. You’ll also learn about some of the research accomplishments by our volunteers, associates and staff. As we continue to pursue our long-term vision to be the best field-based paleontology department in North America and build a world-class paleontology collection, we look to you for your amazing and continued support in the field, labs, collections, and research. The outstanding volunteer core in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science makes this all possible. In 2016, we added several new staff to the Department and celebrated those that moved on. The most recent addition to our team is David Krause. Dave recently “retired” as a Distinguished Service Professor from Stony Brook University in NY and joined our department as a half-time Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology. Dave brings expertise on fossil mammals to our team. After the promotion of Carla Bradmon, we hired our new Business Support Specialist, Taylor Foreman. Hailing from the flats of Lubbock, Texas, Taylor is not only excited about living next to the mountains, but also the opportunity to join our field teams. Kristen MacKenzie has also stepped into a new role in the Department, and is now our Interim Collections Manager. Thus far, her team of volunteers and collections assistants has catalogued over 30,000 microfossils from Snowmass and Porcupine Cave. Now Kristen is turning her talents to the rest of our collections. Finally, after being an intern with the Department for a year, Gabi Rossetto stepped into a term Collections Assistant position. Gabi supports all aspects of the collections but is focused on paleobotany and leading the Leaf Whacker volunteer group, which has now been going strong for six months. Last year, we also saw two dedicated staff members leave our department. After 24 years as Collections Manager, Logan Ivy retired. During his time, he saw the collections grow from about 5,000 specimens to more than 1.2 million specimens. He mentored a few undergrads and high school students along the way, including two of our current curators (Ian & Joe). We will miss Logan already and we hope he comes back soon to join our team in a volunteer capacity. Adam Behlke, our preparator and head of the casting and molding lab, landed his dream job at the Smithsonian, helping to assemble specimens for their new Hall of Dinosaurs. We are currently hiring for both Adam and Logan’s positions in 2017. We will also be adding three new term Collections Assistants to Vertebrate Paleontology and Geology/Invertebrate Paleontology in addition to a new “Digital Technician” working to expand our volunteer-driven science into 3D fossil “preparation.” 2017 is shaping up to be a huge year for Earth Sciences. Thank you again for all the support you have given the Department in 2016! We are looking forward to an incredible 2017 field with new fossils and new discoveries! Denver Museum of Nature & Science 2016 Earth Sciences Year in Review Ian Miller Curator of Paleobotany Chair, Department of Earth Sciences Over the past few years, my work at the Museum has concentrated on 1) field, lab, and collections activities focused on fossils from formations in Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, North Dakota, Montana and Madagascar; 2) growing and sustaining the amazing Department of Earth Sciences; and 3) leading an ongoing major Museum initiative called the Natural World of Colorado, which aims to deepen people’s connection with the natural world. In 2016, I spent most of my research time focused on the Denver and Williston Basins in North Dakota and Montana with Tyler Lyson, and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah with Joe Sertich. In truth, most of my fieldwork is supported by the massive, long-term projects that my colleagues in the Department are leading. I am fortunate to be part of this incredibly collegial and collaborative group of scientists as we work together to tell the grand story of life on Earth. Finally, I am so grateful for the incredible support that the Earth Sciences volunteers give to the Department. Without them, our field, lab and collections work would not be possible. Denver Basin Denver Formation, Colorado Maastrichtian to Paleocene During the summer of 2010, we were gearing up to make a major push to restart the Denver Basin Project. That fall, our lives changed and with the incredible discoveries in Snowmass. With that project done and after nearly a nearly six year hiatus, I was thrilled to be working in the Denver Basin again last summer. Here, I am working with Tyler and we are mostly concentrating on the recovery of life after the dinosaur extinction at the KT boundary. Even though my work is primarily partnered with Tyler, Joe and I co-authored a paper on the recovery this past summer with our colleagues at CU (Dahlberg, E.L., J.J. Eberle, J.J.W. Sertich, I.M. Miller. 2016. A new earliest Paleocene (Puercan) mammalian fauna from Colorado’s Denver Basin, U.S.A. Rocky Mountain Geology 51: 1-22.) Denver Museum of Nature & Science 2016 Earth Sciences Year in Review In addition to this work, I’ve also helped supervise a master’s student at Wesleyan University. She applied four different proxies for estimating past CO2 levels in the atmosphere to fossils from the Castle Rock Rainforest. While the paper is imminent, she presented our work at AGU. Science Magazine picked up the story and wrote about it in the first issue of 2017. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/fossil-leaves-suggest-global-warming-will-be-harder-fight-scientists- thought. Early Paleocene fossil leaves from the Denver Basin collected in 2016. Denver Museum of Nature & Science 2016 Earth Sciences Year in Review Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) Kaiparowits Formation, Utah Campanian My work in the Kaiparowits Formation and collaboration with Joe Sertich on the Laramidia Project continued in 2016. I was in the field for only a few days (8 to be exact). My fieldwork focused mostly on prospecting new areas and supporting the field camps. In my time, we found a few new leaf and vertebrate sites. I’m looking forward to a big field season in 2017! In the lab, we did a tremendous amount of work on the existing Kaiparowits collection, which numbers in the tens of thousands of specimens. As a result, we have a huge backlog. Thanks the diligent work of Gabi and the Leaf Whacker volunteer core, I expect we will have all existing Kaiparowits fossil plants prepared and curated by August 2017. Finally, I am also supervising Gussie Maccracken as she pursues her PhD at the University of Maryland. In a couple of months, I’ll be out to help administer her qualification exams! After that, she will have time to focus on her research work, which is centered on the insect-plant interactions in the Kaiparowits Formation. A fossil leaf of unnamed new species of vine from the Kaiparowits Formation. Denver Museum of Nature & Science 2016 Earth Sciences Year in Review Williston Basin Hell Creek and Fox Hills Formations, North Dakota and Montana Maastrichtian Over the past few years, I have been exploring how my paleobotanical work with Tyler in the Williston Basin would dovetail with the decades of work that Kirk Johnson did in the region. During 10 days in the field with Tyler and Kirk this past summer, we devised a plan in which our new research and collecting focus would be in the oldest sections of Hell Creek Formation and also in the underlying Fox Hills Formation. Since Kirk’s research focus has always been the youngest sections of the Hell Creek Formation and the extinction at the KT Boundary in the Williston Basin, by looking at older rocks, we can tie the previous work in the Williston Basin to that of the Laramidia Project. In 2016, we found several new key localities including a site that produces incredible Leepiercia leaves (figured below). We expect to keep this work going in future seasons. Leepiercia, an extinct sycamore, collected in 2016. Denver Museum of Nature & Science 2016 Earth Sciences Year in Review James Hagadorn Tim & Kathryn Ryan Curator of Geology Ediacaran-Cambrian Radiation (Sonora, Mexico): La Cienega, Puerto Blanco Formations April The Ediacaran - Cambrian transition (~550-520 mya) is of broad interest because it spans the evolution of most major animal phyla, the advent of burrowing and biomineralization (= bones, teeth, shells!), and the colonization of land and the deep sea. The latest Ediacaran La Cienega Formation and earliest Cambrian Puerto Blanco Formation of Sonora, Mexico are unique among the world’s Ediacaran-Cambrian successions because they contain an intercalated record of siliciclastic, carbonate, and volcanic rocks. The diverse lithologies of the Sonoran succession permit us to capture information from trace fossils, soft-bodied fossils, and biomineralized fossils, which usually have different modes of preservation governed by lithology. Unlike most successions of this age, which only preserve a fraction of the biological diversity of this interval, the Sonoran strata offer us windows into three of the most common modes of fossil preservation that typify this time period. The succession also offer opportunity to characterize the sedimentology and environments represented by these strata, and to integrate them with geochemical proxies (mostly from the carbonate rocks) and provenance proxies that help correlate, date, and constrain the environmental evolution of these rocks.