Fieldwork and Research

Palm leaf collected from the late Oligocene of the Lunpo

Research: The Tibetan Plateau: The biodiversity hotspot during the Paleogene

Dec 1, 2017

Dr. Tao Su is an associate professor and principle investigator with the Paleoecology Research Group of the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical … Continue

Digitizing Dinosaur Footprints

Sep 30, 2017

Editor’s note: ReBecca Hunt-Foster, District Paleontologist for the Canyon Country District of the BLM in Southeastern Utah, encouraged interns and other … Continue

Allison Stegner assisting with the excavation of Dytrophaeus, San Juan County, Utah. Photo credit: ReBecca Hunt-Foster, 2016

Survey of Bears Ears National Monument

Sep 30, 2017

Editor’s note: ReBecca Hunt-Foster, District Paleontologist for the Canyon Country District of the BLM in Southeastern Utah, encouraged interns and other … Continue

Research: Introducing Paleobotany Graduate Student MacKenzie Smith

Sep 30, 2017

Greetings FOSSIL friends, My name is MacKenzie Smith. I have just started my paleobotany PhD program here at the University … Continue

The skull of an extinct flightless auk from the Late Miocene of Orange County (Cooper Center specimen). Kloess and Parham (2017) show that these birds became much more abundant in California at the end of the Miocene. Photo credit Daniel Weiherer / James Parham

Research: Recent Studies on the Vertebrate Paleontology of Orange County, California

Jun 1, 2017

The student-led research in my lab at Cal State Fullerton is largely based on a wealth of unstudied fossils recovered … Continue

New Characters in a Long History of Bighorn Basin Paleontology

Mar 1, 2017

The Bighorn Basin of northern Wyoming and southern Montana preserves a nearly continuous record of sedimentation from the Cambrian (520 … Continue

Michelle Barboza holds the tooth of the youngest fossil crocodile known from California, and one of the fossil horse teeth used to determine it’s age

Research: Horse Teeth Reveal the History of the Youngest California Crocs

Mar 1, 2017

Let’s talk about crocs! Florida, home of the FOSSIL project headquarters, is famous for them. “Wait a second,” you might … Continue

Figure 2. A living foram, Alveolinella quoyii from the reefs at Papua New Guinea, showing the calcified test (shell), the anastomosing pseudopods with granules (characterizing the group) arrayed in the direction of movement and shorter ones at the other end and along the sides that stabilize it. Like all forams, it eats bacteria, algae and possibly some small animals. This kind also harbors dinoflagellate symbionts inside its test that photosynthesize, allowing the foram to grow larger

Foraminifera and the Cushman Foundation

Dec 1, 2016

Microfossils have perhaps one of the best fossil records of any group of organisms. These tiny fossils include whole skeletons … Continue

Thin section view showing the internal structure of Alveolina forams

Research: Larger Benthic Foraminifera and the Eocene-Oligocene Transition

Dec 1, 2016

Larger benthic foraminifera are amazing but rather underappreciated fossils. They have a long geological history, ranging from the Palaeozoic to … Continue

Fossil locality exposing the Bridge Creek Flora of the John Day Formation. Shown here are Aaron Currier and Robert Rose, collecting leaves for educational kits. Every slab or rock you see has at least a fragment of a fossil in it.

Adventures in Oregon

Sep 1, 2016

I recently had the great pleasure of visiting the North American Research Group (NARG) for their annual Fossil Festival and some fossil … Continue