Julie Meachen, Assistant Professor at DMU, visited SEPL over the last week to continue work on the Natural Trap Cave project. Julie, along with Dr. Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide, is the principal investigator on the grant that opened up Natural Trap Cave for research over the last 5 years. The original...
Wyoming PBS has done an episode of it’s “Main Street, Wyoming” series about Natural Trap Cave. This episode explains all about where we get the material that we look through at Fossil Wednesdays and really puts it into the broader context of the research being done at the site. Check it out above!...
326 Cherry Emerson 3-5 pm every Wednesday Feb. 7- April 18 We have new fossil material and new faces. Come join us for Fossil Wednesdays this Spring and explore matrix excavated Summer 2017 at Natural Trap Cave. Hear about the new publications coming out of the cave. See pictures & videos of Jenny’s new...
After several months of learning how to ship pallets and negotiating prices, our pallet full of Natural Trap Cave Matrix has arrived from Des Moines! We now have 1300 lbs of sacks containing soil, rocks, and (most importantly) fossils from Natural Trap Cave’s latest excavations. Each of these sacks was collected with careful, fine-scale...
Fossil Wednesdays have been a great success thus far this year. We have a whole slew of new attendees, and we are getting through a bunch of material. In fact, we are nearly entirely through our 3,000-year-old Holocene layer- likely one more week! We’ve picked thousands of fossils out of this layer. I’ll give...
How did so many small mammal, lizard, bird, & fish bones get concentrated at Natural Trap Cave?!? Aaron has already databased >16,000 bones & teeth!!! The answer, it seems, is that packrats gather bones from the surface around the cave entrance, and then stash them in their nests along the inner rim of the...
July 8-19, Jenny & Aaron experienced their last year of fieldwork at Natural Trap Cave for the foreseeable future. Jenny spent 7 consecutive days in the cave, and was extremely productive. She analyzed and mapped the stratigraphy of the south wall of the excavation section, and sampled each strata for microfauna. She also sampled...
