This is Mazon Monday post #260. What's your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:[email protected].
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Sorry for the delay today. Typepad was having technical difficulties.
WBEZ had a recent story about Mazon Creek fossils. Some of our favorite scientists at the Field Museum were mentioned in the article.
Arjan Mann, a paleontologist at the Field Museum of Natural History who specializes in Mazon Creek fossils, is studying what he thinks might be a new species of salamander ancestor. This fossil is just one of many that was found just 50 miles south of Chicago. Manuel Martinez/WBEZ
Field “super volunteer” Jack Wittry arrives early in the morning at the museum to identify and catalogue the fossils that have been his life’s work. Manuel Martinez/WBEZ
Inside the fossil hunt: Digging for the monsters of Illinois’ Mazon Creek
Under McFetridge Drive in Chicago, two stories down in the catacombs of the Field Museum of Natural History, Jack Wittry slides open a handmade wooden drawer. There are thousands of such drawers that visitors never see, in row after row of towering, metal cabinets.
These drawers hold more than 63,000 specimens that were dug out of the ground 50 miles south of Chicago over a 200-year period. Hammered open by people like Wittry to find a prize inside, they represent one of the most spectacular fossil beds on the planet: the Mazon Creek lagerstatte, or mother lode.
Wittry lifts a two foot-long dagger-shaped rock from the drawer and hands it to a visitor. It is 300 million years old, twice the age of the dinosaurs upstairs. The rust-colored stone is split into two halves; on each half is an imprint of an extinct conifer leaf in exquisite detail. The neatly typed tag identifies it as Cordaites borassifolius and credits “J. Wittry.”
A fossil hunter found all eight pieces of it while wading in waist-deep creek water and feeling the bottom with his bare feet.
The Field Museum holds tens of thousands of specimens in its Mazon fossil collection. They are encased within a “concretion” where all of the soft parts are exposed in exquisite detail. Manuel Martinez/WBEZ
Cal So, a post-doctoral student, works with Mann’s team to create a three dimensional rendering of a newly discovered salamander ancestor, using CT scans and electron microscopy. Manuel Martinez/WBEZ
The plant fossils of Mazon Creek are stored in rows of cabinets two stories underneath the Field Museum, where Michael Donovan is the collections manager. Manuel Martinez/WBEZ
