DIGITIZING THE USGS-DENVER RED BIRD WYOMING FOSSIL COLLECTIONS

The USGS Fossil Repository in Denver has the finest upper Cretaceous mollusk collection in America. This includes William A. Cobban’s Red Bird fossil collection, collected in the 1960s with James Gill and others. The fossils, very well preserved and mostly uncrushed, provided a rare opportunity to evaluate the range zones of certain key species, with at least 18 zones of ammonites recognized. Cobban’s biostratigraphy of the Red Bird section of the Pierre Shale, published in 1966, is so detailed that it has become the reference for the rest of the Pierre Shale across the area of the Western Inland Sea. Bentonite sampling of the Red Bird conducted by Cobban and Obradovich (published in 1993) provided radiometric data for Cobban’s chronologic charts of the Western Interior. That publication serves as the baseline for new in-depth bentonite and fossil sampling for current research projects in the Red Bird section.

Digitizing this collection shows the depth of data at the repository. Measurements, photos, drawings, and notes supplement the locality cards of each of the 73 or so locality numbers. All of the information from the handwritten locality cards and notes was put into a searchable database, along with their inventory location in the repository. Cobban himself has also been a resource, from deciphering handwriting to species identification. Currently only a note has been made that there are measurements, photos, and drawings of the fossils, but these can be scanned and linked in, as well as maps and stratigraphic sections from Gill and Cobban’s 1966 professional paper. Each of the localities has been geo-referenced. The database that will result from this project will connect Cobban’s extensive work on the area and the physical location of the fossils that researchers will need to study, as well as allow others to research the collection. This poster indicates the depth of data for the Red Bird localities.