A Forest in Ash
Plants of the Cretaceous will be featured at our next online meeting (on Zoom) on Wednesday, March 10th. We will begin at 6:30pm Central time for informal chat and show-and-tell of fossils, with the formal meeting starting at 7:00pm. The main presentation will be given by Dori Contreras, of the Perot Museum, on “Forest Structure During the Rise of Flowering Plants: Insights from the Southern Western Interior and Beyond”.
We actually have volcanic rocks here in North Texas. Huge volcanoes along the west edge of North America erupted periodically during Cretaceous times. The ash fell into the seas which covered our area, and was altered to smectite clays, or bentonite layers. These clays shrink and swell with drought / wet cycles, which contributes to cracked foundations and the roller coaster ride on I-635 north of DFW Airport. In New Mexico, during the Late Cretaceous, a similar ash blanketed a forest, preserving so many leaves in volcanic tuff that Dori needed volunteers to help document them all. The remarkable site also preserved many upright stumps, now silicified. She gathered enough data to produce a relatively complete view of the 70 million year-old forest!
Please join our Zoom meeting by clicking on this link:
https://zoom.us/j/98793267492?pwd=VDlzT2dvN2FrMFRqZFNIZFNtek14dz09
or start the Zoom app and join the Meeting ID: 987 9326 7492, with the Passcode: 986057. Be sure you are acquainted with the Zoom controls, which appear when you move the mouse over the window, and learn how to turn on and off (mute) your audio, and your video feed. We hope to see you there!
The DPS is a group of professional and amateur paleontologists that want to exchange information, interact, and continue their education in paleontology. We meet once a month on the second Wednesday evening of the month at Brookhaven College, Building H.
