Crystal Wilkinson

Reared by her grandparents on their farm in the Indian Creek community of Casey County, Kentucky, Crystal Wilkinson writes fiction, poetry, and essays about the rural and small-town experiences of African Americans in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Wilkinson’s exploration of this overlooked element of the contemporary African American experience places her in a group of Kentucky artists associated with the Affrilachian Poets, of which Wilkinson was a founding member. Inspired by poet Frank X Walker’s concept of “Affrilachia,” an acknowledgment of the African American presence in and influence on Appalachia, Wilkinson and her colleagues have explored African American connections to rural and small-town places, families, and communities. Wilkinson’s work includes two volumes of short stories—...

Dogs and Pigs and Birds, Oh My! A Bevy of Animals Serve as Partners in Literacy

“Living things in the library encourage reading. They certainly provoke questions and conversations with patrons.”That quote from Kate Capps, children’s librarian and school liaison of the Olathe Indian Creek Library in Kansas, is one that I—and many other librarians—would tend to agree with, based on the number of programs nationwide that encourage kids to read to or with animals.

The oldest vertebrate trace fossils from Comb Ridge (Bears Ears Region, southeastern Utah)

Vertebrate trace fossils are common in Upper Triassic deposits across the American southwest. These ichnofauna are dominated by Grallator, Brachychirotherium, and Pseudotetrasauropus, and lack ichnotaxa traditionally considered to be Early Jurassic in age, such as Eubrontes and Anomoepus. While known from Indian Creek and Lisbon Valley, Utah, vertebrate trace fossils have not been previously reported from Comb Ridge, Utah. This is significant considering that lithostratigraphic work has been ongoing at Comb Ridge since the 1990s in the elsewhere fossiliferous ‘Big Indian Rock Beds’, in the US Highway 163 roadcut that transects Comb Ridge. 2016 fieldwork by the Museums of Western Colorado: Dinosaur Journey recovered two sandstone slabs that had been dislodged from a river channel sand in the Church Rock Member of the Chinle Formation. The slabs preserve the first documented Triassic vertebrate trace fossils from Comb Ridge: a single pes impression of the ichnogenus Grallator, and several manus and at least one pes impression of a small archosaur. We tentatively refer this second track set to the ichnogenus Brachychirotherium. Taken together, these specimens provide evidence for a more diverse vertebrate fauna in the Church Rock Member of the Chinle Formation at Comb Ridge than indicated by the current body fossil record.

The oldest vertebrate trace fossils from Comb Ridge (Bears Ears Region, southeastern Utah)

Vertebrate trace fossils are common in Upper Triassic deposits across the American southwest. These ichnofauna are dominated by Grallator, Brachychirotherium, and Pseudotetrasauropus, and lack ichnotaxa traditionally considered to be Early Jurassic in age, such as Eubrontes and Anomoepus. While known from Indian Creek and Lisbon Valley, Utah, vertebrate trace fossils have not been previously reported from Comb Ridge, Utah. This is significant considering that lithostratigraphic work has been ongoing at Comb Ridge since the 1990s in the elsewhere fossiliferous ‘Big Indian Rock Beds’, in the US Highway 163 roadcut that transects Comb Ridge. 2016 fieldwork by the Museums of Western Colorado: Dinosaur Journey recovered two sandstone slabs that had been dislodged from a river channel sand in the Church Rock Member of the Chinle Formation. The slabs preserve the first documented Triassic vertebrate trace fossils from Comb Ridge: a single pes impression of the ichnogenus Grallator, and several manus and at least one pes impression of a small archosaur. We tentatively refer this second track set to the ichnogenus Brachychirotherium. Taken together, these specimens provide evidence for a more diverse vertebrate fauna in the Church Rock Member of the Chinle Formation at Comb Ridge than indicated by the current body fossil record.