Visiting a Prairie Pompeii to See our Mid-Continent Region
By Fred Paillet, OS Education Chair During my days as a geology instructor, I often saw the disappointment from students on field trips to view fossil excavations. Having seen T-rex and triceratops skeletons embedded in their reconstructed environments at some of our great museums, students are bummed out to observe nothing more than bits of bone fragments and disembodied teeth in a sandy matrix. The sad fact is that almost all fossil remains of exotic creatures from the past consist of disarticulated bones that have suffered a long tumble among gravel and boulders before collecting in the bottom of a lagoon. Even more disappointing is the observation that most of the exposed landscape in the Ozarks has been eroding away for more than 200 million years. The remaining rocks contain a few bivalve shells, fragments of crinoid stems, or the flattened stems of coal swamp plants – all from ages before large animals roamed the planet. The only place we can see degraded remains of truly impressive creatures is in the far southwest of the state where sediments consist of a pro-grading coastal plain with some respectable dinosaur trackways. A little to the northwest there are the remains [...]