Dark Center of the Universe: Historical Geology Field Trip

The past few days I had the opportunity to go on a field trip with Dr. Gahn's Historical Geology class. This was especially cool since I've been on this field trip before as a student, and this time I got to repeat the experience as a teacher's assistant. A quick note about the class, it is essentially a history class that applies geological principles and covers 4.6 billion years of history. In fact, Dr. Gahn makes his class worth 4.6 billion points, meaning each of his four tests is worth about 1,000,000,000 points. Since most of Earth's history is recorded through sedimentary rocks and fossils, the highlight of this field trip was to dig for real fossils in southern Utah.

The first stop on the trip was a behind-the-scenes tour of the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point near Salt Lake City, which has the largest collection of mounted dinosaur skeletons in the world. Sadly, they don't have the Dracorex Hogwartsia; that one is in the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. They also make fun claymation movies for kids, which apparently involves eight hours of work to produce about six seconds of film. Anyway, here are pictures:

A mural on the outside of the museum building.

Two small complete dinosaurs not yet on display.

Dr. Gahn talking to one of the museum workers.

Dinosaur bones being recovered from rock.

A recovered skeleton mounted with the rock.

And in the museum itself:

Crinoids.

A big fish above a rock full of Dactylioceras Ammonoids.

Utahraptor. The real velociraptor is only three feet tall, but they made it bigger just for the movie Jurassic Park. Right after they made Jurassic Park, they discovered Utahraptor, which was exactly the size of the raptors in the movie. Also, it was recently discovered that velociraptor had feathers; not for flying, but probably for insulation or maybe to help maneuver when running.

Bugs in amber!

Triceratops has always been one of my favorites.

I forget what these guys are called, but anything that fights by ramming stuff with its head is cool.

This guy is a small Tyrannosaur.

A huge prehistoric sea turtle.

I really like this fish. I have one that isn't nearly so nice, but it's cool because my fish bloated in the sun and exploded in a big mess before being fossilized. There are scales all over.

Help me!

That night we camped at the sand dunes at Little Sahara in Millard County, Utah. Local schools were out, so there were a lot of noisy people camping and riding their dune buggies and four-wheelers up and down the dunes all night. It was loud, but I got this cool picture:

The next morning we went to study the sand dunes, and I discovered that if you dig a bit, the sand will flow and form canyons that look quite a bit like Bryce Canyon:

Then the highlight of the trip: digging for trilobites at U-Dig Trilobite Quarry near Delta, Utah.

Trilobites are ancient marine ancestors to modern crustaceans and insects. There are other things in these rocks, but trilobites are the most common and cool. I don't have photos of the ones I found yet, but these three are the common trilobites found in this quarry:

Elrathia kingi

Asaphiscus wheeleri

Peronopsis interstricta (much larger than life)

On the way to the next stop I completely shredded a tire:

We changed the tire and looked at contact metamorphism at Fossil Mountain:

Fossil Mountain

Nice sunset view from Fossil Mountain

The next and final day we hiked partway up a canyon on Fossil Mountain, looking for fossils and following rock units.

We found a Bull Snake and took pictures, then later a rattlesnake and stayed away.

Trace fossils (burrows)

A spectacular angular unconformity.

Dr. Gahn lecturing.

The last stop was a playa lake in Utah, where we looked at algae similar to the algae that formed ancient mounds and converted Earth's atmosphere to one we can breathe.