The Desert that was an Ocean An ancient bone bed in the Nevada desert holds clues to the West’s past — and the Earth’s evolutionary puzzle FEATURE By Hillary Rosner

oute 50 across Nevada has long been dubbed tumbledown miners’ cabins stand as shaky monuments as much as 40 tons. (Mass is notoriously difficult to esti- species’ origins and the evolutionary forces exerted by our “Something “the Loneliest Road in America.” But turn off to a gold-and-silver strike in the early 1900s, and to the mate for extinct creatures, particularly those with no liv- planet’s oceans. Throughout Earth’s history, all manner of happened it onto Nevada 361 at Middlegate — popula- lives of those who worked it. A bit farther down the dusty ing analog.) Though reptilian, it gave birth to live young land-dwelling creatures have essentially walked into the tion 17 and the only gas for dozens of miles — road is a monument to another kind of vanished life, a in the water. sea and transformed, over eons, into something entirely here. Is this Rand 50’s near-empty asphalt seems congested by com- boneyard from a time not just before humans, but before Discovered in 1928 and partially excavated beginning new. Shonisaurus — descended from a reptile that walked a graveyard? parison. Here in the back of the back of beyond, cruising dinosaurs — 150 million years before T. Rex. in the 1950s, these fossils keep an ancient secret — one on land — is among them. What might its skeletons add Is this a past salt flats and lava tubes and mountains cut like sand Poking out from a hilltop protected by a barn-like that Neil Kelley and Nicholas Pyenson are determined to to the story of life on Earth? castles, you might even imagine you’re the last human structure and scattered among rocks and scree on miles of uncover. The two Smithsonian National Museum paleon- To reconstruct a plausible plot with no witnesses and murder site? A ball cap featuring on Earth. Or perhaps the first. Against this otherworldly nearby slopes are the fossilized remains of ichthyosaurs — tologists have assembled traditional and high-tech tools, only spotty evidence, the team must get creative in its a prehistoric We’re trying ichthyosaur rests scenery, it isn’t hard to conjure a landscape long before giant marine reptiles that terrorized Earth’s bygone seas. along with a team hailing from three separate institutions. investigative tactics. Vertebrate fossils, after all, aren’t to figure on the dash of a humans arrived. These bones belong to the species Shonisaurus popu- “Something happened here,” says Pyenson, 35, Smithson- straightforward research subjects “like pressed plants or truck on Route 50 in that out.” Nevada, near Berlin- About an hour southeast of Middlegate lies the en- laris, a sort of super-sized dolphin with paddle-like front ian’s curator of fossil marine mammals. “Is this a grave- microscope slides,” says Pyenson. Chasing truth in a pile Ichthyosaur State trance to Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. Rising from limbs and a long tail ending in a fin. Among the largest yard? Is this a murder site? We’re trying to figure that out.” of timeworn bones demands patience, persistence, and a —Nicholas Pyenson, Park. Smithsonian’s curator Courtesy the desert’s unpeopled quiet is the ghost town of Berlin, of the ichthyosaurs, S. popularis could reach 40 feet in The mineralized bones of these animals may also help constant balancing dance between imagination and doubt. of fossil marine Nicholas Pyenson/ Smithsonian where a blacksmith’s shop, an assay office and some length, with a 10-foot-long skull, and may have weighed shed light on a deeper mystery: one that involves their Please see Fossils, page 16 mammals

12 High Country News December 21, 2015 www.hcn.org High Country News 13 ichthyosaurs “lined up like logs along the in the 1980s and 1990s for her doctoral ultimately prove nothing more than “the A team from the agenda: to explore how top predators in mands of the marine environment yield About 250 Fossils, continued from page 13 shore, and rotting in the sun. research at UC-Berkeley, concluded there physics of centers of gravity,” Pyenson Smithsonian the ocean have changed through the ages, the same structures in completely differ- was no evidence for the idea that Shon- says. Where clues are scarce, you gather Institution’s National million years On a warm, cloudless morning, Kelley reshaping entire ecosystems. About 250 ent creatures. Today’s apex ocean preda- One of the carcasses may have isaurus popularis “frequented intertidal all you can. Museum of Natural and Pyenson scout the main excavated million years ago, Earth was rocked by tors are simply the most recent rendition seemed fresh as if it had come in waters or was prone to stranding.” History works at ago, Earth quarry. An 80-foot-wide slice of rock, now the Permian-Triassic extinction — the of a song that Earth has been singing for on the last tide. Its skin, smooth, Berlin-Ichthyosaur Carefully stepping among the Shon- Gathering the largest clues, how- set up as a sort of museum, cradles a largest in planetary history. Roughly 90 a quarter-billion years. only slightly lined and crinkled, State Park in Nevada, was rocked by isaurus bones, Kelley deals another blow ever — the skeletons of 40-ton animals smorgasbord of fossils, including some percent of marine species disappeared. Berlin-Ichthyosaur offers a snippet — would have glistened in the sun. where they’re using to Camp’s theory. The skeletons, he says, — is an unwieldy process at best. You near-complete ichthyosaurs. Dozens of “After that event, ecosystems are built a brief crescendo, like a passage from the The great head, with its long ta- 3-D imaging to help the Permian- look to be belly-up. can’t pick up a giant skull with calipers. vertebrae, each several inches thick and from the ground up,” Kelley says. “Every- planet’s unfolding ecological score — that pering snout partly embedded study fossils found Pyenson is intrigued. “Cool!” he “Anything bigger than what you can in the prehistoric sea Triassic nearly a foot in diameter, lie alongside thing changes. Things that build reefs will help Pyenson and Kelley illuminate in the mud, lay twisted around responds. hold in your hand means that you can’t bed. scores of rib bones stacked in the rock like change, shellfish change, fish change.” It’s how evolution progresses on a grand alongside the body. Rows of point- extinction. Beached creatures, such as modern see everything in one glimpse,” explains Courtesy Neil Kelley/ fence slats. Jaw fragments show indenta- the first time there’s evidence of land rep- scale. Scientists call it “macroevolution,” ed and fluted teeth ranged down Smithsonian whales, usually end up on their bellies. Pyenson, “which has the effect of really tions from the reptiles’ inch-wide teeth. tiles returning to the oceans and thriving; the natural world’s version of macroeco- the sides of its long upper and Roughly The ichthyosaurs’ orientation suggests limiting your understanding.” But Kel- It’s Pyenson’s first time here, and he ichthyosaurs appear 7 million years later. nomics: a scaled-up picture that explains lower jaws. The monstrous eye, that they were already dead when they ley and Pyenson have found a hack: 3-D 90 percent consults a preliminary digital map the Shonisaurus was the biggest verte- broad patterns at play over eons. glazed in death, was a foot across, hit the sea floor. imaging, or photogrammetry, a relatively team made last summer. He’s dressed in brate yet to take to the water. And ever But first Kelly and Pyenson need while the body, eight feet thick, “Unless they were rolled,” says Kelley. new technique for paleontology, which, of marine a striped Oxford shirt, orange pants, Cha- since, “big predators are continually div- to figure out some more basic things, lay like a half inflated balloon. “They could be rolled,” admits Pyenson. Pyenson says, lets them “search for cos, and a baseball cap advertising Great ing in from land,” Pyenson says. “All these such as just how deep the ocean here species Camp used his vivid imagination to re- Asking whether the animals floated patterns that cut through the random Basin Brewing Company’s Ichthyosaur big, iconic, beloved critters — whales, dol- was. Charles Camp, the University of construct the tragic and compelling scene or sank or stranded is useful, says Pyen- vagaries of what taphonomy leaves for IPA — a nod to Nevada’s state fossil. Kel- phins, sea otters, polar bears. Every time California-Berkeley paleontologist who disappeared. of one reptile’s demise. The poor creature, son, “because what we are really asking, us to find.” A few years ago, for example, ley, a 34-year-old postdoctoral researcher it happens, the whole structure of food studied and excavated the site for more he wrote, was “churning the water into whether it be fossil whales or ichthyo- when workers building a new section of Ichthyosaurs at the Smithsonian and an expert in webs accommodates these great preda- than a decade beginning in 1954, believed a froth with his lashing tail and puffing saurs, is the process of what happens be- the Pan-American Highway in Chile’s extinct marine reptiles, wears a T-shirt tors, and they have an influence that’s the ichthyosaurs died after stranding on appear out air from his lungs in great agonized tween death and discovery.” That process Atacama Desert exposed a bed of fossil- promoting Built to Spill — an indy rock disproportionate to their abundance.” the shores of a giant inland sea. In a slim, gasps.” But there’s one crucial problem: has spawned a science all its own, called ized marine animal bones from roughly band — Chacos to match Pyenson’s, and Even Shonisaurus’ form is one that trippy volume called Child of the Rocks, 7 million Back then, the site was almost certainly taphonomy — the study of the dead. As 6 to 10 million years ago, Pyenson and a “Yo! MTV Raps” trucker hat. With their reappears throughout time, says Pyen- published in 1981 by the Nevada Bureau much deeper underwater; it wasn’t a biological evidence becomes locked in his colleagues raced to the scene armed years later. identical shoes and scruffy facial hair, the son: those paddle-shaped forelimbs, for of Mines and Geology, Camp imagined tideflat. stone, key information vanishes. Recon- with equipment that would preserve a boyish-looking scientists could be paleon- example, and a streamlined body ideal for what “pioneer astronauts” from a distant “There’s no beach sand in these structing that data from other sources is virtual copy of the excavated site. Time tology’s answer to the Hardy Boys. efficient movement underwater. “When planet might have seen had they touched rocks,” explains Kelley. “These are fine- how we ultimately tell the story of lost was short: In just two weeks, construction And indeed, they’ve taken on an am- we see that happen in reptiles, and then down here roughly 220 million years ago. grained mud rocks that you typically get worlds. would destroy more than 40 complete or bitious case. Earlier this year, Kelley and much later in marine mammals,” he says, Standing at the “edge of the muddy tide- in deep-water sediments.” Jennifer Ho- Here, the skeletons’ orientation may partial skeletons — extinct varieties of Pyenson published a paper in the journal “it tells us something really important flats,” he wrote, the visitors would have gler, a paleontologist who studied the site point to something profound, or it may whales and other marine animals, includ- Science, laying out an expansive research about how evolution works.” The de- come upon the stinking carcasses of dead

16 High Country News December 21, 2015 www.hcn.org High Country News 17 Powerful as new technology can be, paleontology still relies on tools that would have been familiar to Berlin’s miners. Outside the fossil shelter, under a sun growing fiercer by the hour, Randall Irmis supervises a sort of geological scavenger hunt. He’s building yet another bridge to the past, this one using infor- mation gleaned from the rock record. With picks and shovels, Irmis and his team dig a trench up a hillside — survey- ing the rock at different levels, above and below the quarry, measuring its layers and taking home samples to test for con- centrations of isotopes, or different forms of chemical elements. That will help determine how the bone beds formed. “It’s pretty low-tech,” says Irmis, a 33-year-old paleontologist at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah who has been involved in the discovery of a half-dozen extinct reptile species. He and Pyenson were housemates during grad school at UC-Berkeley. In addition to containing clues about ichthyosaurs, the dirt and stone at this site can help tell the broader story of Nevada’s prehistoric past — the move- ments of its land and water as well as their inhabitants. The region’s famous “basin and range” topography consists of mountain ranges of very old rocks sepa- rated by valleys of very young rocks. It’s caused by plate tectonics. “Forty million years ago, Nevada was half the width it is today,” Irmis says. “It’s been pulled apart to almost twice its original width just in the last 30 million years.” The Pacific plate used to move underneath the North American plate. But now it moves side to side — a switch that put extreme tension on the western side of North America, pulling it apart “like a Snickers bar,” as Kelley says, and leaving chunks of rock separated by thinner layers. Nevada’s mountain ranges reveal the layers of many eras of the deep past — timelines At the Smithsonian’s ing an aquatic sloth. poisonous algae, died within hours, and photogrammetry uses algorithms to of geologic history scrawled across the Ellis writes in his book Sea Dragons. “We National Museum The scientists combed the area for washed up onto the flat sands of an estu- combine exhaustive, overlapping digital region’s stark scenery. must not be misled by the idea that a of Natural History, clues — in the boneyard, in the rock, in ary. Over millennia, the scenario was images into a high-resolution 3-D model. The geological slices found at Berlin million years is a mere blink of the eye.” Nick Pyenson, the surrounding landscape. “We were repeated, and the bones became buried in The result can be easily manipulated might help explain how these particular One million years is a long, long time. Randall Irmis searching for a single good explanation,” the mud. and examined on a computer, aiding the ichthyosaurs died, or how they ended up Ichthyosaurs roamed the planet’s oceans and Neil Kelley Pyenson says, “for why we had the cast of Along with the imaging technology, an hunt for clues. Blundell, who describes preserved as fossils rather than decom- for roughly 150 million years. The fossil compare fossils with 3-D prints and characters and the condition they were understanding of macroevolution helped his background as “nerd,” has also helped posing like most corpses, their mineral record of whales, by comparison, is only images of extinct in.” The skeletons, perfectly preserved, solve the mystery. Throughout history, make other 3-D scanned models, includ- components recycled to the sea. Or they about 50 million years old. marine predators to lay just meters from one another, piled in four-legged animals that return to the ing an image of President Obama, and — might offer answers to questions we Sitting around the campfire one eve- understand the fossil four layers that each represented roughly water dive in at the top of the food chain. as part of an ongoing project — a replica haven’t yet asked. ning, I mentally strip this spot of its con- reptiles found at 10,000 years of history. By building 3-D That makes them susceptible to things of the space shuttle Discovery. But visualizing long stretches of temporary features: first the SUVs, picnic Berlin-Ichthyosaur digital models, the scientists were able to like toxic algae, whose effects can be mag- In addition to making massive objects change over time, across a physical land- tables and composting toilets, and then State Park in observe the skeletons from angles impos- nified the higher up the chain you go. easier to examine, digital 3-D models scape, is a tricky endeavor. Pyenson calls the piñon pines, sagebrush and Mormon Nevada. sible in the real world. “These views gave Pyenson hopes Berlin-Ichthyosaur can bring fossilized bones and other rare it “the mind-fuck of geology.” To imagine tea plants. I erase the biting red ants Olivier Douliery us the luxury to see every nook, cranny will ultimately prove as scrutable as objects to a wider audience, allowing what the area around Berlin looked like underfoot and the scorpions scurrying in and overhang, and really understand how the whale bone bed. Inside the Ichthyo- researchers around the world swifter during the age of the ichthyosaurs, you the shadows. I try to ignore the constella- different bones, and the tangled skeletons saur shelter one morning, Holly Little, and longer access. Bones from fossil digs need to time travel back to a very differ- tion of REI tents on the desert floor and of different individuals, were positioned Smithsonian’s “paleoinformatics special- too often end up virtually reburied in ent planet. The Mesozoic era lasted from instead focus on the dazzlingly starry sky relative to each other,” Pyenson says. ist,” prepares the eons-old fossils for their museum basements. Many of the Shon- 248 million to 65 million years ago. Try- above — though even this would have The team ultimately concluded that 21st-century moment, carefully sweep- isaurus bones that Camp excavated from ing to fathom that timespan is daunting, looked different to the ichthyosaurs. the killer was a toxic algae bloom: a red ing away dust with brooms and brushes. Berlin-Ichthyosaur still lurk in cartons and the familiar trick of picturing Earth’s In a camp chair beside the rising tide, like those implicated in the recent Meanwhile, Jon Blundell readies a series at the Nevada State Museum. “A few 4.6-billion-year history as if it’s 24 hours smoke, Irmis — another boyish-looking deaths of Florida’s manatees and bottle- of cameras and laser scanners, mounted paddles are on display, but then there are on a clock seems unhelpful: It minimizes scientist with scruffy facial hair and a nose dolphins. Iron eroding from the on tripods that he’ll carry around the site. boxes full of wrapped-up bones sitting un- the scale, and therefore the scope, of our baseball cap — tells me that the trench At the Natural History Museum of Utah, Fred Lacy cleans part of a rocks of the Andes could have caused it. The lasers capture millions of data points disturbed,” Pyenson laments. Who knows awe. “To grasp the face of evolution, we revealed layers of limestone interspersed fossilized humerus bone of a Shonisaurus, top, that was found during a The whales and other animals would that essentially describe the surface of what mysteries might be solved if more don’t need to speed up the film, we need with the layers of mud that Kelley dig at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. Above, the museum’s paleontology have eaten prey contaminated with the the objects with sub-millimeter accuracy; eyes could scrutinize those bones? to slow it down,” marine biologist Richard described earlier. “You think about an curator, Randy Irmis, holds a fossilized Shonisaurus tooth. Kim Raff

18 High Country News December 21, 2015 www.hcn.org High Country News 19 Because it’s easy to imagine all sorts of Paleontologists from crazy scenarios based on strange fossils, the Smithsonian, paleontologists must remain vigilant University of Utah about evidence. What does the geology and University of say? What do the bones say? Which ex- Nevada in one of the quarries in Berlin- planations make sense based on the evi- Ichthyosaur State dence, and which are pure speculation? Park in Nevada, “Complexity is really challenging to keep where scientists in your head,” Pyenson says, “and then believe hundreds you’re always playing this game of, like, of the prehistoric ‘Is what I’m seeing connecting to what I reptiles may be think is going on in my head, which may buried. just be a fantasy?’ ” Courtesy Neil Kelley/ Smithsonian One such story is in part what pro- pelled the team to Berlin-Ichthyosaur in the first place. A few years ago, a husband-and-wife paleontology team “You want ocean environment; it’s got to be fairly sun for a moment, I crouch in the shade proposed a new theory for the Nevada quiet to get mud deposited, but it’s got to of a piñon. At my feet, a mess of reddish boneyard: 100-foot-long, hyper-intelligent, to look be warm enough and fairly close to the rock shards stretches up and down the narcissistic cephalopods with a taste for surface to get calcium carbonate.” Back in hill. “How can you possibly pick out ichthyosaur. out for the the Triassic, when Shonisaurus popularis something like a jawbone — or any fossil “Giant Kraken Lair Discovered,” a crammed the seas of the American West, — when it all looks so similar?” I wonder press release blared shortly after Mark Shonisaurs. eastern Nevada would have formed its aloud. No sooner have I uttered the words and Dianna McMenamin of Mount You’re a little coastline. Despite a distance of 200 miles than I begin to distinguish fossils all Holyoke floated the idea at an annual to land, Irmis says, the ocean here was around me. I start picking up some of the geologists’ meeting in 2011. An article on snack for relatively shallow, maybe a few hundred smaller ones, and soon I have handfuls of Livescience.com explained the McMe- feet deep. bones — bits and pieces of ribs encased namins’ theory that the “markings and them.” The sea Irmis is describing was in limestone. Paleontologists call these rearrangement of the S. popularis bones —Paleontologist part of Panthalassa, also called the fossils “float” — bones that erosion and suggests an octopus-like creature either Randall Irmis, Proto-Pacific, the “super-ocean” that once weathering have left exposed on the sur- drowned the ichthyosaurs or broke imagining what life surrounded the mono-continent Pan- face rather than buried beneath the soil. their necks” before purposefully deposit- would have been like gaea. Much of that land mass floated in But these seemingly trivial rock scraps ing their vertebrae into a pattern like in a Triassic era sea the Southern Hemisphere — meaning can be crucial pieces of the prehistoric the suckers on a squid’s tentacle. “The that our fire pit, at roughly 38 degrees puzzle. They’re the glass shards from a researchers,” the article said, “suggest latitude, sat in a very different part of backwards-gazing crystal ball. this pattern reveals a self-portrait of the the globe. Back in the Triassic, this same Nearby, Paige dePolo, an undergradu- mysterious beast.” spot was at 5 or 6 degrees latitude, in the ate from the University of Nevada, is The evidence for this idea? There isn’t tropics. assembling another pile of float. Pyenson any, save for the way the skeletons’ ar- “So we could be floating peacefully in and Matt McCurry, a research fellow rangements appeared to the two observ- a calm, warm sea,” I venture. from Australia, head toward us, each car- ers. “It is a case of reading the scattered “Except for the giant reptiles swim- rying an armful of fossilized bones. They bones as if they were tea leaves able to ming around you,” Kelley says. could belong to the same individual as tell someone’s fortune,” paleontology blog- “Yeah, you want to look out for the the skull, or represent additional ichthyo- ger Brian Switek wrote on Wired.com. Shonisaurs,” says Irmis. “You’re a little saurs. “The story isn’t nine individuals But though the kraken theory may snack for them.” dying,” says Pyenson, visibly pleased by be more science fiction than science, it the glut of fossils here. “It’s hundreds.” invokes a broader truth about our quest During the years that Charles Camp Berlin-Ichthyosaur’s jawbones in par- for knowledge. Humans are a storytelling worked at Berlin-Ichthyosaur, he excavat- ticular intrigue Pyenson. Some contain species. In science, those stories must be ed about a half-dozen quarries. One is the teeth, and others don’t, making him won- based on evidence. But even when they sheltered bone bed; another lies partway der whether Shonisaurs lost teeth as they are, we often get them wrong. New ideas, up an adjacent slope. But Camp worked aged and their diets changed. “This is new theories, new evidence, new tech- before the days of GPS. Though he made something we see with a lot of big ocean niques — all of these prod us forward, meticulous drawings, his directions left predators,” he says. “They go through dif- and we modify our understanding as we much to interpretation. Part of the team’s ferent ocean niches as they grow.” go. goal is to relocate some of Camp’s quar- He and Kelley are also debating the Scientific inquiry is a process of con- ries. They’re certain that the fossil trove timing of the ichthyosaurs’ deaths. How stant revision. And as any writer will tell has barely been touched. closely together did they happen — over you, revision is where the most interest- On a search for Quarry 4 one after- hours? days? weeks? longer? And how ing things surface. Dinosaurs, we once noon before I arrived, Cornelia Rasmus- long did the bones linger on the ocean thought, were lumbering, tail-dragging sen, a doctoral student in Irmis’ lab, floor before they were buried? Partly from reptiles. Now we’ve come to believe that found a tantalizing piece of jawbone em- studying the digital model of the bone- they were warm-blooded, carried their bedded in the rock. A few days later, we yard, they already have one theory for Hillary Rosner writes tails off the ground, and often came with set off to take a better look. We scramble how some of the bones came to their final about science and feathers. Who knows how future discover- several hundred yards up a steep hillside resting place. “A good analogy is how the the environment ies will change the narrative? covered in scree, to where the ichthyo- corner of a hockey rink sometimes accu- Shonisaurus popularis has a real for Wired, National saur jaw lies in the shadow of a juniper. mulates clusters of pucks, over the course story, a concrete series of events that Geographic, Scientific It’s about 10 inches long, with perfectly of time,” says Pyenson. “Ichthyosaur happened millions of years ago. But to American and other preserved indentations from its teeth. vertebrae start off as a wrapped package publications. She lives recreate it, we must cast back across vast The creature’s whole jaw might have of pucks on their side, and then slowly in Boulder, Colorado. spans of time, assembling clues from each been three to five feet long. More of its unroll, until they collect together again, new lead we unearth. Luckily, technology This story was funded skeleton is likely buried not far beneath given enough time.” The process is a clue improves and dirt shifts: There will al- with reader donations the surface, somewhere on this same hill. to the oceans: It suggests passive cur- ways be another bone that pokes up from to the High Country Partly to keep from slipping down rents making “very organized structures the ground and entices us a little way News Research Fund. the slope and partly to dodge the blazing from basic units.” farther down the path to the truth.

20 High Country News December 21, 2015