Predictive Map Leads Fossil Hunters to Pay Dirt [Slide Show]
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VASTNESS OF Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin illustrates the fossil hunter’s dilemma: Where to begin looking for remains? Image: Robert Anemone
FLAT TERRAIN covered with shrubs is bad for finding fossils. The team was able to avoid such areas using their novel technique. Image: Robert Anemone
PREDICTIVE MAPS guided the team to these sandstones, which turned out to mark the first fossil-bearing site located using this approach. Image: Robert Anemone
AFTER ARRIVING at the sandstone site, 10 team members crawled the area for an hour and a half before finding the first concentration of fossils there. Image: Robert Anemone
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EXPEDITION MEMBER Brett Nachman of the University of Texas at Austin spots fossils. Image: Robert Anemone
ANT HILLS may contain fossils. The ants collect teeth, foot bones and other bits of small mammals when building their mounds. Image: Robert Anemone
TINY JAW of a primate in the genus Cantius that lived around 55 million to 50 million years ago is an especially important discovery that the team made while ground-truthing the predictive maps. Image: Robert Anemone...
Researchers have long relied heavily on luck when it comes to finding fossils. In the May Scientific American paleontologist Robert Anemone of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and geographer Charles Emerson of Western Michigan University, describe a novel approach to locating these ancient needles in a haystack. They have developed computer models that analyze satellite images of a region to find unexplored areas bearing the same radiation signature as known fossil sites, and may thereby harbor remains of interest. Recently they put their new technique to the test, taking the predictive maps generated by the models into the Great Divide Basin in Wyoming and prospecting for fossils in those areas identified by the models as likely to contain fossils.
This article was originally published with the title "Predictive Map Leads Fossil Hunters to Pay Dirt [Slide Show]" in Scientific American 310, 5, (May 2014)
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