Just thought I'd let folks know that my latest fossils-related web page is Fossil Insects And Vertebrates On The Mojave Desert, California :
Visit two world-famous paleontologic localities situated on California's vast Mojave Desert. They're from what geologists call the middle Miocene Barstow Formation. And--they're 17 to 13.4 million years old.
One specific site within the Barstow Formation is without question among the most unusual fossil-bearing areas on earth. Not only does it yield many species of insects, but also lots of spiders, water mites, fairy shrimp, ostracods (a small bivalve crustacean) copepods (a minute crustacean often called Cyclops), cladocerans (tiny crustaceans commonly called "water fleas"), and even diatoms (a microscopic single-celled plant), as well--all of which can be dissolved whole and intact, in three-dimensional form, from their calcium carbonate (limestone) concretion encasings. It is one of only a handful of places on the planet where fossil insects can be removed without damage from their matrix.
A second geologic district in the Barstow Formation provides vertebrate paleontologists with one of the most significant terrestrial records of middle Miocene animal life in North America--a place rich with the remains of extinct horses, camels, pronghorns and proboscideans, among many other mammalian varieties. It is, in fact, the type locality for what geologists, paleontologists, and stratigraphers call the Barstovian Stage of the middle Miocene, roughly 16 to 12.5 million years old--an epochal stage of North American Cenozoic Land Mammal Biochronology with which all other time-correlated rocks in North America are compared.
Visit two world-famous paleontologic localities situated on California's vast Mojave Desert. They're from what geologists call the middle Miocene Barstow Formation. And--they're 17 to 13.4 million years old.
One specific site within the Barstow Formation is without question among the most unusual fossil-bearing areas on earth. Not only does it yield many species of insects, but also lots of spiders, water mites, fairy shrimp, ostracods (a small bivalve crustacean) copepods (a minute crustacean often called Cyclops), cladocerans (tiny crustaceans commonly called "water fleas"), and even diatoms (a microscopic single-celled plant), as well--all of which can be dissolved whole and intact, in three-dimensional form, from their calcium carbonate (limestone) concretion encasings. It is one of only a handful of places on the planet where fossil insects can be removed without damage from their matrix.
A second geologic district in the Barstow Formation provides vertebrate paleontologists with one of the most significant terrestrial records of middle Miocene animal life in North America--a place rich with the remains of extinct horses, camels, pronghorns and proboscideans, among many other mammalian varieties. It is, in fact, the type locality for what geologists, paleontologists, and stratigraphers call the Barstovian Stage of the middle Miocene, roughly 16 to 12.5 million years old--an epochal stage of North American Cenozoic Land Mammal Biochronology with which all other time-correlated rocks in North America are compared.