By Mary Fairchild Anza-Borrego Desert The Great Basin stretches from southern Idaho to Southern California which includes all, or portions, of Oregon, California, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. Its southwestern parts are now known as the Mojave and Colorado Deserts of Southern California. In this large, generally dry, mountain-studded region of the West the rivers do not flow to the sea…
Category: Fossil/Science/Green
Mazon Creek Fossils
By Mary Fairchild In all North America, the Mazon Creek flora has the largest number of species and greatest taxonomic diversity of any Moscovian Pennsylvanian period assemblage. More than 200 species have been documented, of which the majority are fern and seed fern foliage. Jack Wittry Jack Wittry has written six scientific articles and has published two…
Dinosaur Bone Hunting
By Mary Fairchild2015, New Castle, Wyoming. When dinosaurs walked the earth, a vast inland sea had covered the area from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Today, our families can walk the earth and uncover the very paths of the dinosaurs through trips with Dr. Steve Nicklas of Paleo Prospectors. For the past several years…
Wisconsin’s Glacial Mounds
By Mary Fairchild Known as the “Driftless Area,” southwestern Wisconsin escaped glaciation. A low plateau deeply cut by stream valleys, it is an old landscape whose rougher surface contrasts with ice-formed topography. Astellated buttes, spires, and pinnacles were sculpted by Glacial Lake Wisconsin breaking on sandstone outliers of the Driftless Area. This is a view…
Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art: Chinese Jade Carvings, Fossils, and Minerals
By Mary Fairchild The Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art displays a large selection of Chinese jade and hard stone carvings from around the world as well as lapidary materials, fossils, meteorites, and minerals. My husband and I stopped in and chatted with Dorothy Ascher who is the granddaughter the museum’s founder, Joseph Lizzadro. Flickr Pictures…
Mid-America Paleontology Society Annual Fossil Show Moves to Iowa
By Mary Fairchild Is it dinosaur? This fossil was found in gravel in northwest Iowa. Flickr Picture Set The huge continental glaciers that advanced and retreated across Iowa during the Ice Age picked up large volumes of rock and other sediments as they moved across the continent. Today, reworked and transported Cretaceous fossils, which underlie large areas of the…