Just recently I uploaded a page called Field Trip To A Vertebrate Fossil Locality In The Coso Range, California.
It's a cyber-visit to the upper Miocene to upper Pliocene Coso Formation in the Coso Mountains, which lie in the transitional Mojave Desert-Great Basin region west of Death Valley National Park, near Olancha, along the eastern side of California's Owens Valley.
The Coso Formation is a roughly six to three million year-old geologic rock deposit that yields quite a number of mineralized mammalian remains, including a vole (the famous Cosomys primus, named for its occurence in the Cosos), rabbits, meadow mice, a hyaenoid dog, peccaries, a mastodon, slender camelids, large grazing horses (including the famous Hagerman Horse--named for its spectacular occurrences at Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, Idaho--one of the earliest examples of the genus Equus, which of course includes all modern horses and equids), a large-headed llama, and a bear.
Additional paleontological specimens described from the Coso Formation include: ostracods (a minute bivalved crustacean); algal bodies (stromatolitic developments created by species of blue-green algae); diatoms (a microscopic single-celled photosynthesizing single-celled plant), fish--and, prolific quantities of pollen from conifers and flowering plants (angiosperms), palynological specimens that add invaluable paleobotanical information to the Coso story.
It's a cyber-visit to the upper Miocene to upper Pliocene Coso Formation in the Coso Mountains, which lie in the transitional Mojave Desert-Great Basin region west of Death Valley National Park, near Olancha, along the eastern side of California's Owens Valley.
The Coso Formation is a roughly six to three million year-old geologic rock deposit that yields quite a number of mineralized mammalian remains, including a vole (the famous Cosomys primus, named for its occurence in the Cosos), rabbits, meadow mice, a hyaenoid dog, peccaries, a mastodon, slender camelids, large grazing horses (including the famous Hagerman Horse--named for its spectacular occurrences at Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, Idaho--one of the earliest examples of the genus Equus, which of course includes all modern horses and equids), a large-headed llama, and a bear.
Additional paleontological specimens described from the Coso Formation include: ostracods (a minute bivalved crustacean); algal bodies (stromatolitic developments created by species of blue-green algae); diatoms (a microscopic single-celled photosynthesizing single-celled plant), fish--and, prolific quantities of pollen from conifers and flowering plants (angiosperms), palynological specimens that add invaluable paleobotanical information to the Coso story.
