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.