Evolution in Oklahoma, a Road Trip: Piles and Piles of Fossils

Don’t forget the Oklahoma Evolution Road Trip, May 30-June 2. We have enough registrants that the trip is unlikely to be canceled, but there is still room! Tentative deadline is May 3, but we can accept a few more applications after that date. We just need to plan ahead about how many rooms and vehicles, and how much food, to provide. Read more about it here as well as in blog entries posted earlier (below).

One of the places we will be visiting, in our search for fossils, is Fort Washita, near Durant, Oklahoma. It is a site of great historical interest. It was built by the U.S. Army to defend the Chickasaw tribe against western tribes, whose land had been taken in order to resettle the Chickasaws from their ancestral homeland that the U.S. had confiscated. Then, in the Civil War, Ft. Washita became a Confederate fort. History and politics back then was a big mess, just as it is today, only there was a war going on right here on our American soil.

Ft. Washita was located on a hill because it allowed visibility across the prairie in order to observe the approach of understandably hostile tribes, or (later) Union soldiers. Today, most of the surrounding landscape is forested, but when the fort was built it was mostly prairie, with some scattered post oaks and bois-d’arcs. It is possible that some of the very large post oaks and bois-d’arcs that are today on fort property were alive when the fort was active. Each bois-d’arc tree appears to be several trees that have grown together. This probably occurred because the animals that originally dispersed the large fruits (e.g. mammoths and gomphotheres) have been extinct for thousands of years. The mammoths would have spread the seeds out in their dung, but since the mammoths were extinct the fruits simply landed on the ground and all the seeds began to grow in a clump.

But the main topic of interest is something that very few visitors notice when they come to the fort. I am embarrassed to admit that I did not take notice of it until recently. Most of the original buildings are made from rocks quarried from an extremely fossiliferous layer. Some of the stones appear to consist almost entirely of mollusk fossils. We’ve all seen fossils, but perhaps nothing quite like this.

So join us for the Road Trip if you can!

Evolution in Oklahoma, a Road Trip: A Dramatic Geological Past, part two.

I continue now to describe some of the geological things that we will see on the Evolution Road Trip May 30 to June 2, 2013. See here for more information.

Back in Pennsylvanian days, about 300 million years ago, sediments had been building up and turning into rock in what is now Oklahoma for over a hundred million years. Then something dramatic happened. Part of the land rose, part of it fell. Cambrian and Ordovician rocks now looked down into deep valleys. Big rocks eroded down into those valleys. Soon the valleys were filled with what was to become conglomerate rock. And such conglomerate! See the photo. The component rocks are big, and sharp-angled, both of which facts mean that the rocks did not get carried very far before being mashed together. At the scenic overlook north of Exit 47 on Interstate 35, you can see contorted layers of Ordovician limestone right next to Pennsylvanian conglomerate. Two hundred million years ago, this is where the cliff was.

Today, young couples spray-paint proclamations of love on the exposed strata. But do they have any idea what “4ever” means against the backdrop of 500 million years of geological history sometimes hidden, and sometimes exposed, in central Oklahoma?

Even in the gentlest rolling hillsides of south central Oklahoma, there are surprises. There is a very thin layer of limestone crammed with fossils (see photo). This layer is a little harder than the others and creates a shelf that I have driven past many times and never noticed. Thanks, Gordon, for pointing this and all of the preceding things out to me.

I have learned so much since my old creationist days. And I continue to learn. Most of these geological sites are near Sulphur, Oklahoma, which has a whole bunch of youth Bible camps. I am sure that one of these camps was where the Church of Christ cult of which I was a member had its summer youth meetings at which young men and women could meet and marry within the cult. (We were the branch of the C of C that rejected not only instrumental music and Sunday school but even insisted on using a single cup rather than individual cups during communion.) I never went to one. But here I am, perhaps driving right past them, in search of evidence about the evolutionary past that my erstwhile cult so vigorously denied.

Evolution in Oklahoma, a Road Trip: A Dramatic Geological Past, part one.

Breaking news: European Space Agency scientists just announced that the universe is older than previously thought: it is 6,001 years old, not 6,000. (Actually the official estimate was raised from 13.7 billion to 13.8 billion years.)

In a previous entry, I announced an Evolution Road Trip for May 30 to June 2, 2013. See here for more information. I will now tell you some reasons why I am excited about this trip. First, the geological evidence of the evolutionary past.

In the Arbuckle mountains of central Oklahoma, the sedimentary layers have been lifted up and eroded, with the result that the oldest deposits are highest in the mountains. Creationists love to point out this reverse order as evidence against evolution. But you can actually see the angles by which the layers have been uplifted.

Another thing you can see in the deposits is the difference between near-shore and deep-water (near the edge of the continental shelf) deposits. In shallow water, there is plenty of sunlight, a strong food chain, and lots of fossils; in deep water, there are fewer fossils. In addition, coarser sediments accumulate in shallow water, while finer sediments disperse into deeper water. No Flood of Noah could explain why most of the fossils are found in coarser sediments. There is a roadcut that we will visit on this trip that displays this evidence very nicely. See the photo for the Ordovician fossils found at that site. Look closely and you can see disarticulated crinoid segments, branches of bryozoans, mollusks, and even pieces of sand dollars.

At the top of the Arbuckles, you can see stromatolites. They look like lumpy rocks. But if you look closely at the photos you can see some of the splotches that used to be cyanobacterial mats; and you can see the layers inside the lumps that resemble those found in modern stromatolites.

Why are stromatolites exciting? Because a billion years ago, stromatolites were just about the highest form of life.

In the next entry, I will tell some more exciting geological stories about Oklahoma.

Note: There was an ecotour in Big Bend in March that cost $2885 for five days not counting travel, plus $450 for single accommodations. Considering this, the Oklahoma Evolution Road Trip is quite a bargain. We have a tentative registration deadline of May 3.

Evolution in Oklahoma, a Road Trip: First Announcement

I am pleased to announce that Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education and the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences are sponsoring an evolution road trip in southern Oklahoma and northern Texas this summer. That is, so long as we get at least nine registrants. The dates are Thursday May 30 (my 56^thbirthday) to Sunday June 2. Our home base is the University of Oklahoma Biological Station on the shores of beautiful Lake Texoma. The cost will be $350 per person; for participants who want a single room, the cost is $400. You can’t beat that for a four-day weekend of outdoor science! The trip is open to anyone interested in science, regardless of background, but we particularly want to draw local pre-college science educators. If you are a schoolteacher and want to go on this trip, you can get professional development credit and (if we get enough participants or donations) a partial refund of the costs. Furthermore, if we have enough participants, we may be able to give partial refunds to everyone.

For reasons that I will explain in upcoming entries, I am pretty excited about this trip. I realize that many of my readers live far away from Oklahoma. But if you’ve never been here, you might be surprised. No, it doesn’t look like the flat dry set of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. It is a fascinating concatenation of ecology and geology (which is part of the reason that there is so much oil and gas here). Y’all come, y’hear?

The trip is designed especially for pre-college science instructors, although anyone with an interest in science is invited to participate. We expect to get together a group of people who will enjoy talking with one another and investigating some perhaps little-known highlights of southern Oklahoma and northern Texas—perhaps little-known even to people who live around here. I admit that, until Dr. Gordon Eggleton showed me around, I had no idea how many exciting bits of geological evidence there are in southern Oklahoma. There is a dramatic and hidden history underneath the Oklahoma dirt. Today, Oklahoma sits quietly in the middle of the North American plate. But a hundred million years ago, it was a pretty exciting place.

You can read all about it at the University of Oklahoma Biological Station website (http://www.ou.edu/uobs/evolution.html). The full brochure, with photos, is there, along with a registration form and instructions.

In upcoming blog entries, I will write about some of the things we will see on this trip. If you want to read about it how, visit the website above. If you cannot come but would like to make a donation to help defray the cost for participating schoolteachers, you can make a donation to the University of Oklahoma Foundation. Contact me at srice@se.eduif you are interested. You will be provided with a letter to acknowledge the tax-exempt status of your donation.