POST OAK IN THE PERMIAN: MONTESSORI HIGH SCHOOL JOINS QUANTITATIVE SAMPLING OF EARLIEST APEX PREDAOR, THE RED BEDS DIMETRODON IN THE CLEAR FORK GROUP, BAYLOR COUNTY, TEXAS

The richest deposit of Early Permian large land vertebrates lies in the Craddock Ranch, lower Clear Fork Group, Seymour, Baylor County, Texas. The Houston Museum of Natural Science has been mapping individual bones and shed teeth in a channel-fill 200m N to S, 34m E to W, and up to 3m in depth. Over 96% of fossils lie in ten successive, concave-up, thin silty mudrock units separated by weak paleosol development. The three dimensional mapping requires many hours of slow, careful excavation; valuable contributions come from summer short courses filled by the upper grades of the Post Oak Montessori School. Students scour outcrops for new localities, assist in plaster jacketing of skeletons, and have discussions at the Whiteside Museum, in Seymour, about how their discoveries fill out the data matrix. Patterns appear in predator-prey relations, survivorship of juveniles and ecological separation of amphibian and amniote species, and the place of the Texas Red Beds in long-term evolution.

At the Houston Museum, Post Oak students continue to analyze specimens in the Paleo Lab. The school short courses have produced several bone concentrations that had not been worked previously. In the extreme north of the channel fill, an exceptionally large, mature Dimetrodon limb skeleton documents burial in a coarse sandstone, indicating a higher stream energy unknown elsewhere in the bonebed. At other localities nearby, students have added to the sample size of the rare elements of the Craddock fauna: the giant fin back herbivore Edaphosaurus and the enigmatic “mammal-like reptile” Varanosaurus, last survivor of the ophiacodonts. The Post Oak students contribute key scientific data that integrate into a decade-long museum program. Plus, the participants experience a total-immersion into the ranching culture of north central Texas.