Post by inyo on Apr 23, 2017 11:07:59 GMT -5
Just recently, I uploaded the following page-- Field Trip To A Vertebrate Fossil Locality In The Coso Range, California.
It's a cyber-visit--with detailed text, plus on-site images and photographs of fossils--to the upper Miocene to upper Pliocene Coso Formation in the Coso Mountains, which lie in the transitional Mojave Desert-Great Basin region west of Death Valley National Park, near Olancha, along the eastern side of California's Owens Valley (with the Sierra Nevada in prominent view to the immediate west).
The Coso Formation is a roughly six to three million year-old geologic rock deposit that yields quite a number of mineralized mammalian remains some 4.8 to 3.0 million years old--including: a vole (the famous Cosomys primus, named for its occurence in the Cosos); rabbits; meadow mice; a hyaenoid dog; peccaries; a mastodon; slender camelids; large grazing horses (including the famous Hagerman Horse--named for its spectacular occurrences at Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, Idaho--one of the earliest examples of the genus Equus, which of course includes all modern horses and equids); a large-headed llama; and a bear.
Additional paleontological specimens described from the Coso Formation include: ostracods (a minute bivalved crustacean); algal bodies (stromatolitic developments created by species of blue-green algae); diatoms (a microscopic single-celled photosynthesizing single-celled plant); fish--and, prolific quantities of pollen from conifers and angiosperms (flowering plants), palynological specimens that add invaluable paleobotanical information to the Coso story.
