Strömberg Lab PhD student Paige Wilson (co-advised by Dr. Greg Wilson) is investigating floral turnover and environmental change across the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary in NE Montana. She just finished 2 months of fieldwork in the badlands of Montana this summer, where she and a crew of undergraduate and citizen scientist volunteers collected an estimated 3000 plant macrofossils! Over the course of their 8 week field season, the team dug over 55 quarries and carted away hundreds of pounds of rocks. These fossils are mainly impression and compression fossils of angiosperm leaves, but also include conifer cones and vegetative parts, stems, seeds, and other reproductive structures. This area in NE Montana contains incredible exposures of rocks and rich fossil deposits; it is famous for a number of vertebrate fossils found since the early 1900s. More recently, the Burke Museum’s Tufts-Love T Rex was unearthed nearby—you can watch the prep process happen on display at the Burke Museum in Seattle! This discovery was led by members of the Wilson Lab in UW Biology, along with staff and volunteers from the Burke. Now safely back in Seattle, Paige is working to unpack and catalog these fossils, a careful process that involves numbering, labeling, photographing, and IDing each fossil. Those which require prep work (careful application of glue or special tools called air scribes to clean and expose more of the fossil) are marked, and each is loaded into an archival box to be added to the Burke Museum’s Paleobotany collection. These lucky fossils get to make their home in the new Burke Museum too!
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