OUTREACH OPPORTUNITIES RELATED TO MUSEUM-SPONSORED RESEARCH ON THE URBAN GEOLOGY AND SURPRISING PALEONTOLOGY OF THE LARAMIDE STRATA OF THE DENVER BASIN

Often overlooked by geologists interested in the nearby Rocky Mountains, the subtle topography of the Denver Basin hides a wealth of geological and paleontological data that records the rise and erosion of the Laramide Rocky Mountains and documents the changing nature of ancient landscapes as the region evolved from a shallow epicontinental sea to a young mountain range and adjacent foreland basin in the Late Cretaceous and Paleogene. The orogeny occurred during a time of global greenhouse climate and the rapidly subsiding Denver Basin captured the stratigraphic record of the marine regression, pulses of orogeny, suburban dinosaurs, the K-T boundary impact, mid-latitude tropical rainforests, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and hundreds of discrete ash beds from erupting volcanoes located high in the now-eroded sedimentary cover of the Front Range. Since 1996, research coordinated by the Denver Museum of Nature & Science has built a high-resolution stratigraphic framework for the synorogenic strata derived from the Laramide orogeny. The stratigraphy links two cored wells, over a thousand electric logs, and surface observations with paleoecology, geochronology, magnetostratigraphy and biostratigraphy to map a changing biota across the evolving landscape through highly-resolved time. These same strata contain much-used resources such as groundwater, coal, oil, gas, and carbon sequestration targets. With a museum coordinating the research and with more than 3.5 million people living in the Front Range Urban Corridor, we are able to exploit these local deep time examples of evolution, extinction, and climate change to educational advantage and to tie them to regionally relevant issues of population growth, development, land conservation, resource exploitation, carbon emissions, and public policy. The rocks beneath Denver are yielding a compelling narrative that is surprisingly relevant to the region's rapidly growing population.