#TBT - September 1983 Geotimes

The September 1983 issue of Geotimes (now EARTH Magazine) featured a cover with an image celebrating when the Smithsonian Institution put its collection of fossils from the Burgess Shale on display for the first time at the National Museum of Natural History. The caption reads as follows: "This year for the first time, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History has put on display specimens from its unequaled collection of fossils from the Burgess Shale (British Columbia). At the entrance to Dinosaur Hall, a diorama, shown in part of the cover of this issue, recreates the muddy bottom where those creatures lived at the base of an algal reef. A clutch of arthropods (Canadaspis perfecta) crawls up the slope on the right where mud has slumped from the terrace, the fatal weakness that will bury—and preserve—an entire population of Middle Cambrian shallow marine fauna. Sponges cling to the reef face. (photo by Chip Clark, the Smithsonian Institution)"

EARTH Magazine: La Brea climate adaptation as different as cats and dogs

The La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles are a famous predator trap. For every herbivore, a dozen or more carnivores — saber-toothed cats and dire wolves chief among them — are pulled from the prolific Pleistocene fossil site. In fact, the remains of more than 4,000 dire wolves have been excavated, along with more than 2,000 saber-toothed cats. The sheer number of fossils allows researchers to ask population-level questions about the climate and environment as well as how these animals evolved. Now, two new studies focusing dire wolves and saber-toothed cats are characterizing how the tar pits’ two top predators coped with the warming climate toward the end of the last ice age, and the results are surprisingly dissimilar: While the wolves got smaller, the cats got bigger.

EARTH Magazine: Preserving Peru's Petrified Forest

Tucked high in the Andes Mountains of northern Peru is a remarkable fossil locality: a 39-million-year-old petrified forest preserved in nearly pristine condition: stumps, full trees, leaves and all. With its existence unknown to scientists until the early 1990s — and its significance unbeknownst to villagers — this ancient forest hosts the remains of more than 40 types of trees, some still rooted, that flourished in a lowland tropical forest until they were suddenly buried by a volcanic eruption during the Eocene.

Fossils: Further Research

Here you will find resources that will help students and teachers further understand fossils.

Investigation 7: Being a Paleontologist

Here you will find resources that teachers and students can use to help them understand how to make a fossil profile and how fossils form.

Investigation 6: Adaptations to a Changing Environment

Here you will find resources that teachers and students can use to help them understand how animals adapt to a changing environment.

Investigation 5: Comparing Fossils over Time

Here you will find resources that teachers and students can use to help them understand how organisms have changed over time.

Investigation 4: Fossils through Geologic Time

Here you will find resources that teachers and students can use to help them understand geologic time and the formation of the fossil record.

Investigation 3: Conditions for Fossil Formation

Here you will find resources that teachers and students can use to help them examine and model fossil forming conditions.

Investigation 2: Sediment Size and Fossil Formation

Here you will find resources that teachers and students can use to help them understand the effect that particle size has on fossil definition.

American Geosciences Institute

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