BRYCE CANYON NATIONAL PARK PALEONTOLOGICAL INVENTORY – A MODEL FOR UNDERGRADUATE SCIENCE EDUCATION

Public lands inventories are ideally suited to undergraduate science education. The results of such inventories may or may not lead to significant discoveries or the data may not be adequate for research until a study is completed which may take many years. In this regard, inventories are often not well suited to graduate students who need short term and well-defined significant research projects for their theses. However, inventories are well suited to undergraduates because they learn the processes used in undertaking research and are not looking for thesis scale research projects. Inventories can teach students process and methods as well as provide an almost endless supply of topics appropriate for undergraduate research. I am currently involved in a paleontological inventory of the Cretaceous rocks of Bryce Canyon National Park. There is both a field and laboratory component to this project. During the field season students do extensive measuring of stratigraphic sections, rock description, sampling, prospecting for fossils and making documented collections. Fossil collecting has involved surface collection, extracting large specimens from matrix in the field, and the collecting of matrix to process for microfossils. Field data is collected both by taking traditional field notes and by using GPS instruments and digital imagery. The laboratory aspect of the project involves sorting of field collections, sorting of concentrate produced by screen-washing of microfossil samples, identification of fossils, cataloguing of fossils, petrographic analysis of rock samples, drafting of stratigraphic columns, and generating a GIS data base. In the first year of the project five undergraduate students participated in the field work and eight have been involved in the laboratory aspect of the project. As a result of the first year of the inventory, two undergraduate research projects have developed and there is almost an unlimited potential for other undergraduate projects. In subsequent years students will have the opportunity to build on the previous work of their colleagues and learn that science is an ever evolving process dependent upon the work of other researchers.