| The Florissant Fossil Beds were established as
a national monument by the National Park Service in 1969 to preserve
the Late Eocene plant and insect fossils found there today. The
fine-grained, laminated lake shales formed by eruptions from
the Thirtynine Mile volcanic field contain exceptionally well
preserved fossils. Florissant 34 m.y. ago was very different
than it is today. This lake environment was host to a very diverse
plant and insect community. Warm temperate to sub tropical temperatures
and an elevation close to what it is today (8500 ft) has been
calculated using the plant fossils. Florissant has produced the
most diverse fossil butterfly collection known to date, with
12 species. Given this rare opportunity to look at both fossil
butterflies and host plants, I plan to compose a list of host
plants for the butterflies in the Florissant Formation belonging
to the Family Nymphalidae, which is the best represented of the
families. Because so much study has been done in the classification
of insects, we are able to assign a recent counterpart to each
fossil genus. This year I hope to draw some phylogenetic relationships
between fossil and recent genera of the nymphalids so that I
can get a clearer picture as to what significant evolutionary
changes occurred. With this I hope to avoid the problem of assuming
that recent nymphalids live the same way in their environment
as they did 34 million years ago. |
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| Amanda Cook is a senior geology
major at The College of Wooster. Her hometown is Cleveland, Ohio.
Her research this summer was made possible by an internship at
the Florissant Fossil
Beds National Monument. Her field supervisor was Dr. Herb
Meyer, a paleobotanist with the National Park Service. |
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