scholarly journals Paleontology of the Bears Ears National Monument: history of exploration and designation of the monument

Author(s):  
Jessica Uglesich ◽  
Robert J Gay ◽  
M. Allison Stegner ◽  
Adam K Huttenlocker ◽  
Randall B Irmis

Bears Ears National Monument (BENM) is a new, landscape-scale national monument jointly administered by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service in southeastern Utah as part of the National Conservation Lands system. As initially designated, BENM encompasses 1.3 million acres of land with exceptionally fossiliferous rock units. These units comprise a semi-continuous depositional record from the Pennsylvanian Period through the middle of the Cretaceous Period. Additional Quaternary and Holocene deposits are known from unconsolidated river gravels and cave deposits. The fossil record from BENM provides unique insights into several important paleontological periods of time, including the Pennsylvanian-Permian transition from fully aquatic to more fully terrestrial tetrapods; the rise of the dinosaurs following the Triassic-Jurassic extinction; and the response of ecosystems in dry climates to sudden temperature increases at the end of the last ice age and across the Holocene. While the paleontological resources of BENM are extensive, they have historically been under-studied. Here we summarize prior paleontological work in BENM and review the data used to support paleontological resource protection in the 2016 BENM proclamation.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Uglesich ◽  
Robert J Gay ◽  
M. Allison Stegner ◽  
Adam K Huttenlocker ◽  
Randall B Irmis

Bears Ears National Monument (BENM) is a new, landscape-scale national monument jointly administered by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service in southeastern Utah as part of the National Conservation Lands system. As initially designated, BENM encompasses 1.3 million acres of land with exceptionally fossiliferous rock units. These units comprise a semi-continuous depositional record from the Pennsylvanian Period through the middle of the Cretaceous Period. Additional Quaternary and Holocene deposits are known from unconsolidated river gravels and cave deposits. The fossil record from BENM provides unique insights into several important paleontological periods of time, including the Pennsylvanian-Permian transition from fully aquatic to more fully terrestrial tetrapods; the rise of the dinosaurs following the Triassic-Jurassic extinction; and the response of ecosystems in dry climates to sudden temperature increases at the end of the last ice age and across the Holocene. While the paleontological resources of BENM are extensive, they have historically been under-studied. Here we summarize prior paleontological work in BENM and review the data used to support paleontological resource protection in the 2016 BENM proclamation.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Uglesich ◽  
Robert J Gay ◽  
M. Allison Stegner

Bears Ears National Monument (BENM) is a new, landscape-scale national monument jointly administered by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service in southeastern Utah as part of the National Conservation Lands system. As initially designated, BENM encompasses 1.3 million acres of land with exceptionally fossiliferous rock units. These units comprise a semi-continuous depositional record from the Pennsylvanian Period through the middle of the Cretaceous Period. Additional Quaternary and Holocene deposits are known from unconsolidated river gravels and cave deposits. The fossil record from BENM provides unique insights into several important paleontological periods of time, including the Pennsylvanian-Permian transition from fully aquatic to more fully terrestrial tetrapods; the rise of the dinosaurs following the Triassic-Jurassic extinction; and the response of ecosystems in dry climates to sudden temperature increases at the end of the last ice age and across the Holocene. While the paleontological resources of BENM are extensive, they have historically been under-studied. Here we summarize prior paleontological work in BENM and review the data used to support paleontological resource protection in the 2016 BENM proclamation.


1980 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 481
Author(s):  
John F. Kolars ◽  
William C. Brice

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-244
Author(s):  
Eli Rubin

The essays in this special issue all focus on the city of Berlin, in particular, its relationship with its margins and borders over thelongue dureé. The authors—Kristin Poling, Marion Gray, Barry Jackisch, and Eli Rubin—all consider the history of Berlin over the last two centuries, with special emphasis on how Berlin expanded over this time and how it encountered the open spaces surrounding it and within it—the “green fields” (grüne Wiesen) referred to in the theme title. Each of them explores a different period in Berlin's history, and so together, the essays form a long dureé history of Berlin, although each of the essays in its own way explores the roots of Berlin's history in deeper time scales, from the early modern period, to the Middle Ages, and even to the very end of the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago.


Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia are geographically so closely related that they can he called Fuego-Patagonia. Its two main units are the Andes and the region of the mesetas to the east of them. As a result of the predominantly westerly winds, the rainfall and the forests are concentrated in the Andes whereas in the region of the mesetas and the plains there are steppes and semideserts. The boundary between them seems to be a zone of struggle between the forest and the steppe. Its past oscillations can be studied against the background of palaeogeographic evolution especially since the last ice age. The stratigraphy of bogs and alluvial clays provides most important evidence on this topic. Tierra del Fuego is especially suitable as a study area since bogs are present all over the main island. In order to separate the ice ages with certainty, and thus to find out how many ice ages there were in Fuego-Patagonia, I looked for organic interglacial layers. Those found are the only ones so far recorded in South America. The southernmost is on the east coast of Tierra del Fuego in a till cliff facing the Atlantic Ocean, about 20 km from the Viamonte estancia (figure 26). The peat is, according to a dating at the Yale Geochronometric Laboratory, over 41000 years old. Its macro- and microscopic plant remains reflect a richer flora than the present one.


Author(s):  
Andrew T. Chamberlain

The aim of this chapter is to situate the unique discoveries of cave art at the Creswell Crags caves in the context of what is known of the cave archaeology and palaeontology of the caves of the southern Magnesian Limestone outcrop. The long history of archaeological research at Creswell Crags and the spectacular discoveries that continue to be made in the Creswell caves have tended to overshadow the widespread though less prominent distribution of cave archaeological sites along the limestone outcrop to the north and south of Creswell, a region known as the Creswell Crags Limestone Heritage Area (Mills 2001). Recent audits of the archaeology of the region have drawn attention to the large number of cave sites within the Limestone Heritage Area as well as the considerable potential that these sites have for further research into the history of Ice Age people and their environments (Mills 2001; Davies et al. 2004).While the focus of this chapter is on the Pleistocene deposits and Palaeolithic artefacts that have been preserved in the region’s caves, fissures, and rock shelters, these sites were used throughout prehistory by humans and animals and they contain much important cultural and environmental evidence for these later time periods after the end of the last Ice Age. Creswell Crags is located in the southern part of the Magnesian Limestone, a geological term for deposits of Upper Permian age that includes a series of formations of well-bedded oolitic to dolomitic limestones. The Magnesian Limestone forms a narrow north–south oriented outcrop that runs from near Nottingham in the south to the North Sea coast near Tynemouth in the north (Fig. 6.1). About 30 km to the west of the southern part of the Magnesian Limestone is the older Carboniferous Limestone outcrop of the White Peak, which, like the Magnesian Limestone, contains many archaeological caves. The southern part of the Magnesian Limestone outcrop, between Doncaster and Mansfield, is cut through by a series of vales and gorges which expose caves, fissures, and rockshelters along the cliff lines.


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