Today we went to 2 different sites on one ranch that was thousands of acres in extent. The first site was to find Cretaceous Pierre Shale ammonites. The second site was to find land mammal bones in the Eocene White River Formation. I climbed to the top and worked my way down through the layers. I climbed up four mountain sides trying to find bones, but everything had washed down the mountain. When I started walking back, I found a grayish color layer at the bottom of the first mountain I climbed, JP and I found some fossilized turtle shells. I went around on the same level as the turtle shell and I found a titanothere molar!
We were able to observe on that one ranch that the whole world had changed dramatically! We found dinosaur bones in the terrestrial Cretaceous Lance Formation on the first day. Then we saw a marine section of Cretaceous strata with marine ammonites in it at the first site on this ranch the second day. And then we could see that the world changed entirely when the meteorite impact catastrophically wiped out the dinosaurs. So that in the terrestrial layers laid down in the Tertiary all that dinosaurs were gone but the mammals now ruled! Some of them became very large, like the Titanothere.
The K-T Boundary was the end of the dinosaurs but the beginning for the mammals and the boundary between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras.
We were able to observe on that one ranch that the whole world had changed dramatically! We found dinosaur bones in the terrestrial Cretaceous Lance Formation on the first day. Then we saw a marine section of Cretaceous strata with marine ammonites in it at the first site on this ranch the second day. And then we could see that the world changed entirely when the meteorite impact catastrophically wiped out the dinosaurs. So that in the terrestrial layers laid down in the Tertiary all that dinosaurs were gone but the mammals now ruled! Some of them became very large, like the Titanothere.
The K-T Boundary was the end of the dinosaurs but the beginning for the mammals and the boundary between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras.
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