Fossils

Cerdas, Bolivia

Cerdas, Bolivia

The fossil site of Cerdas, Bolivia, is located on the high, flat plateau in the middle of the Andes Mountains known as the Altiplano. This makes it a challenging place to do fieldwork. The fossil-producing beds range in elevation from about 12,500 to 13,000 feet (3,800 to 4,000 m), which means the air is thin and […]

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Laguna del Laja

Laguna del Laja

A recent area of focus in terms of fieldwork has been the fantastic sequence of strata in the Laguna del Laja area of Chile. These rocks, which are set against a backdrop of a beautiful lake and a picturesque volcano, preserve a diverse array of mammal fossils. We have collected several hundred specimens from the […]

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Fieldwork (Fossils)

Fieldwork (Fossils)

My fieldwork mainly aims to increase geographic and temporal (time interval) sampling within South America. Most terrestrial mammal fossils from South America come from the southern part of the continent (particularly Argentina). Therefore, my colleagues and I have focused our efforts on other areas, such as Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. Some of these localities have […]

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Time and “Land Mammal Ages”

Time and “Land Mammal Ages”

You can’t talk about fossils without talking about time, and mammalian paleontologists (also known as paleomammalogists) generally have two different ways to talk about how long ago an animal lived. The first way is to discuss age in terms of absolute time: saying a fossil is 25 million years old, for instance. The only way to […]

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Other Central Chilean Localities

Other Central Chilean Localities

Many of the other fossils we have discovered in Chile come from a variety of localities in the central part of the country. All of these sites apparently sample the Abanico Formation, a group of rocks that was deposited mainly between about 40 million and 15 million years ago. This particular formation tends to preserve specimens in great […]

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Peru

Peru

I am interested in the extinct mammals of Peru for many of the same reasons I am interested in  the extinct mammals of Bolivia. Therefore, I jumped at the opportunity to collaborate with a French and Peruvian research team led by Pierre-Olivier Antoine on a project searching for mammal fossils in the eastern part of […]

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Basal Notoungulates (Henricosborniidae, Notostylopidae)

Basal Notoungulates (Henricosborniidae, Notostylopidae)

The basal notoungulate families Henricosborniidae and Notostylopidae are mainly known from Eocene fossil sites. Henricosborniids have also been identified from at least one Paleocene site (Tiupampa), and notostylopids survived into the early Oligocene based on a recently named species from Chile, Chilestylops davidsoni (Bradham et al. 2015). The cheek teeth of notostylopids are rather distinctive (see Simpson 1948 for […]

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Mesotheriidae

Mesotheriidae

Mesotheriids, more commonly known as mesotheres, have been known to science longer than almost any other group of notoungulates. The first mesotheriid, Mesotherium, was named by Serres in 1867. At that time, only the toxodontids Toxodon and Nesodon had been named and described. Mesotherium was named “middle beast” in reference to Serres’ belief that it represented an evolutionary intermediate […]

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Interatheriidae

Interatheriidae

The Interatheriidae (interatheres) are perhaps the most successful group of notoungulates; they are the longest-ranging of all notoungulate families, and nearly two dozen genera have been described (though it is unclear how many of these are valid). Moreover, interatheriids are often very abundant in the faunas in which they are found, suggesting high population densities; […]

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Digging for Fossils

Digging for Fossils

When I tell people I am a paleontologist and that I go out on “digs,” they usually think I spend most of the trip literally digging in one place for fossils. This happens occasionally but is not typical of my fieldwork. Most of my time in the field is spent looking for fossils; relatively little […]

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