REU Site Investigation: Paleoenvironmental characterization of a dinosaur site in the Morrison Formation of the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming

Hope College, Holland MI

Investigators

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this project, students will conduct fieldwork to characterize the pale environmental setting of an Upper Jurassic dinosaur site in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming. The primary goals of the site analysis are to understand the stratigraphic setting of the site, the environments hosting fossils, and the pale ecology of the organisms preserved there. Students will work under the auspices of Hope College, in cooperation with personnel from the University of Minnesota Duluth, the Cranbrook Institute of Science, and the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History. Intellectual merit. Dinosaurs in the Morrison Formation occur in several scattered clusters of sites that represent a wide variety of depositional settings. The project site is part of an understudied cluster in the Bighorn Basin, at the northern reaches of the Morrison Formation. Although the site has yielded unusual dinosaur fossils including theropod teeth and articulated sauropod remains its paleoenvironmental setting has not been examined. Understanding the project site's pale environmental setting, dinosaur fauna, and relationship to other sites in the Bighorn Basin cluster will improve knowledge of the region and allow more equable comparisons between the Bighorn Basin and better-known regions across the Morrison Formation. These comparisons will provide a firmer basis for recognizing temporal and spatial heterogeneity in pale environments as well as pale ecological and taphonomic variation across the formation.