Not too long ago, I uploaded a new page, entitled Field Trip To The Alexander Hills Fossil District, California . Includes a detailed text, with fully captioned on-site images and photographs of fossils.
It's a fascinating paleontological place, indeed, situated outside the southern sector of Death Valley National Park. The Precambrian sequence, for example, not only yields stromatolites, concentrically laminated cyanobacterial structures roughly 1.2 billion years old, but also some of Earth's earliest shell-bearing organisms, skeletal elements from eukaryotic single-celled testate amoeba over three-quarters of a billion years old. The early Cambrian sequence provides the first trilobites in the regional stratigraphic succession, archaeocyathids (extinct calcareous sponge), annelid and arthropod tracks and trails (ichnofossils), and perhaps the earliest evidence of echinoderms in the fossil record. Miocene strata produce exceptionally well preserved petrified palm and dicotyledon wood, permineralized grasses, and camel tracks. And the Pliocene-Pleistocene section contains loads of vertebrate remains, including mammoths, a mastodon, camels, large and small horses, a llama, a large antelope, microtine rodents (the voles, lemmings, and muskrats), and a flamingo--plus, such invertebrate kinds as freshwater gastropods, ostracods (a diminutive bivalved crustacean), and diatoms (single-celled photosynthesizing algae).
It's a fascinating paleontological place, indeed, situated outside the southern sector of Death Valley National Park. The Precambrian sequence, for example, not only yields stromatolites, concentrically laminated cyanobacterial structures roughly 1.2 billion years old, but also some of Earth's earliest shell-bearing organisms, skeletal elements from eukaryotic single-celled testate amoeba over three-quarters of a billion years old. The early Cambrian sequence provides the first trilobites in the regional stratigraphic succession, archaeocyathids (extinct calcareous sponge), annelid and arthropod tracks and trails (ichnofossils), and perhaps the earliest evidence of echinoderms in the fossil record. Miocene strata produce exceptionally well preserved petrified palm and dicotyledon wood, permineralized grasses, and camel tracks. And the Pliocene-Pleistocene section contains loads of vertebrate remains, including mammoths, a mastodon, camels, large and small horses, a llama, a large antelope, microtine rodents (the voles, lemmings, and muskrats), and a flamingo--plus, such invertebrate kinds as freshwater gastropods, ostracods (a diminutive bivalved crustacean), and diatoms (single-celled photosynthesizing algae).
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