The book is based on travels that Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, completed before he came to Washington, D.C. Kirk Johnson chronicled his recent journeys in Cruisn' the Fossil Coastline: The Travels of An Artist and a Scientist Along the Shores of the Pacific, excerpted here. I love experiencing the most unlikely natural phenomena on our planet and a cave formed by an incinerated rhino surely ranks high on that list. But I had not come this far not to crawl into the rhino’s rump. A nine-foot climb above a narrow ledge above a long drop did not appeal to me. We were elated, and I was just a bit terrified. Cool.” We looked up and there was the hole. Then we read one that said: “Found it! Straight above this cache. Several celebrated the success of their authors in finding the rhino.
PREHISTORIC RHINOCEROS FOSSIL SERIES
We were about to give up when we noticed a geocache with a series of notes. We found several small holes that must have once contained petrified logs, but the rhino hole was nowhere to be found. At the top we were confronted with a little zone of treacherous verticality and gingerly made our way to a ledge the width of a narrow sidewalk. We scrambled up the steep slope to the base of the cliff. Someone had painted a white “R” about 200 feet up-a very good sign. Now we had arrived to find that same hole on the cliff face. The Frieles and the Peabodys found it 13,000 years later. Then 15 million years passed, and the Spokane Floods miraculously eroded a hole at the tail end of the beast. Eventually, the lava cooled and was buried. Because the walls of the cavity were pillow basalt, which forms when lava flows into water, the obvious conclusion was that a rhino was in a shallow pool or stream when it was entombed. It had the distinctive shape of a large and somewhat bloated four-legged rhinoceros lying on its back. In 1948, a University of California, Berkeley crew made a plaster mold of the cavity’s interior. Scientists identified the jaw as belonging to a Miocene rhinoceros called Diceratherium, a distant relative of our modern rhinos, first discovered in 1875. Instead, he found fragments of fossil bone including part of a jaw. Haakon Friele crawled in, expecting to find fossil wood. In 1935, two couples, the Frieles and the Peabodys, were poking around the lava cliffs in search of petrified wood when they found a large hole. To get a feel for one of the oddest fossils on the continent, we pulled over at the north end of Blue Lake in Washington and plunked down $9 to rent a rowboat.
Which is why, over the past ten years, the artist Ray Troll and I went on a series of eye-popping paleontological road trips from Baja California to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Geologically, the West Coast of North America is one of the oldest coastlines on earth, but its amazing fossils are little known even to local residents.
0 kommentar(er)
