After several years in the works, a new special issue featuring 12 foundational papers about Natural Trap Cave research has been published in Quaternary International. Julia Schap’s initial analysis of the community composition of the small mammals off NTC is included in the special issue, and PI McGuire co-authors five of these papers, including...
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!...
Read the blog write-up about Aaron Woodruff, Paleo Lab Tech extraordinaire, and his love of paleontology!...
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...
How did so many small mammal, lizard, bird, & fish bones get concentrated at Natural Trap Cave?!? Aaron has already databased >16,000 bones & teeth!!! The answer, it seems, is that packrats gather bones from the surface around the cave entrance, and then stash them in their nests along the inner rim of the...
Last week, Aaron gave an invited talk about diversity in science at Florida Museum of Natural History’s myFossil Fossils For Teachers Professional Development Workshop....
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...
