Late Tertiary Continental Fossils from the Pipe Creek Sinkhole, Grant County, Indiana

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

The PI will coordinate field work at the Pipe Creek Sinkhole, a recently discovered site in Grant County, Indiana, which preserves unconsolidated sediments containing a diverse late Tertiary assemblage of animals and plants. The study will be a collaborative effort between Indiana-Purdue University, Fort Wayne and the Indiana State Museum (the repository for specimens). Field work will comprise on-site wet-sieving and concentration of sediments (some sediment samples will be bagged for later sieving in the lab). Sieve concentrate will then be picked for small fossils in the lab. The PI will create a database in which each identifiable specimen will be associated with records about the sample and size fraction of sediment from which it came. This will eventually be used to analyze the paleoecology of the site. In addition, the PI will set up a lab for preparing thin sections of lower vertebrate bones from the assemblage for osteohistological/skeletochronological analysis relevant to reconstructing the late Tertiary paleoclimate in the region of the Pipe Creek Sinkhole.