Public Events --
Brownbag Lectures: Fossil Lake, Oregon: The Steamy Story Behind a Classical Pleistocene Locality
- Location: ISM Research & Collections Center, Springfield
- Date: Wednesday, November 02, 2011, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Presented by Dr. Katherine McCarville, Upper Iowa University The paleontological locality at Fossil Lake, Oregon, has been known to science since the late nineteenth century. Fossil Lake is an important avian locality and contains at least 70 species of fossil birds, as well as large and small mammals, fossil fish, and other aquatic organisms.
Most previous workers have proposed deposition in a Pleistocene pluvial lake-dominated environment, and many have left unchallenged the assignment of the deposit to the Rancholabrean NALMA. But the geometry, lithostratigraphy, and faunal and taphonomic evidence at Fossil Lake, as well as its location within the Fort Rock basin maar field, all support the hypothesis that the locality occupies a volcanic eruption crater or crater complex. The maar hosted environments that were attractive to many species of birds, especially water birds, and many of the avian fossils accumulated in aquatic or semi-aquatic environments within the maar, during low stages of the pluvial lakes that occupied the Fort Rock Basin. The Fossil Lake maar crater formed in the mid-Pleistocene and has remained as a depositional basin since then, accumulating and preserving a time-averaged fossil assemblage.
One of our Brownbag Lectures
Weekly lectures held at the Museum's Research and Collections Center. Lectures are usually held during lunchtime on Wednesday. The RCC is located at 1011 E. Ash Street in Springfield. Access to the building is from 10 ½ Street (between Ash and Laurel Streets), where there is ample visitor parking in the west parking lot. For more information, please call 217-785-0037. Brown Bag Lectures are free and open to the public.
Also, if you want to be informed of upcoming lectures by email, you can sign up for the brownbag announcement list.
For more events at ISM Research & Collections Center.
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