In collaboration with Julie Meachen (Des Moines University), we have received funding to conduct two more seasons of field work at Natural Trap Cave. We plan to perform additional excavations, particularly to fill out our microvertebrate data. We will also do a survey of the microvertebrates living in the vicinity of the cave, both...
**UPDATE** Position filled! Please see our Opportunities page for additional opportunities to become involved in SEPL. We are currently inviting applicants for a postdoctoral position to examine the microfauna of Natural Trap Cave. Postdoctoral researchers will work closely with Drs. Jenny McGuire (GT) and Julie Meachen (DMU). For this project, we are looking for...
Julie Meachen, Assistant Professor at DMU, visited SEPL over the last week to continue work on the Natural Trap Cave project. Julie, along with Dr. Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide, is the principal investigator on the grant that opened up Natural Trap Cave for research over the last 5 years. The original...
Wyoming PBS has done an episode of it’s “Main Street, Wyoming” series about Natural Trap Cave. This episode explains all about where we get the material that we look through at Fossil Wednesdays and really puts it into the broader context of the research being done at the site. Check it out above!...
After several months of learning how to ship pallets and negotiating prices, our pallet full of Natural Trap Cave Matrix has arrived from Des Moines! We now have 1300 lbs of sacks containing soil, rocks, and (most importantly) fossils from Natural Trap Cave’s latest excavations. Each of these sacks was collected with careful, fine-scale...
Fossil Wednesdays have been a great success thus far this year. We have a whole slew of new attendees, and we are getting through a bunch of material. In fact, we are nearly entirely through our 3,000-year-old Holocene layer- likely one more week! We’ve picked thousands of fossils out of this layer. I’ll give...
July 8-19, Jenny & Aaron experienced their last year of fieldwork at Natural Trap Cave for the foreseeable future. Jenny spent 7 consecutive days in the cave, and was extremely productive. She analyzed and mapped the stratigraphy of the south wall of the excavation section, and sampled each strata for microfauna. She also sampled...
