Pleistocene of the Caribbean Region

Wooster geology students have been studying the Pleistocene and Holocene rocks and fossils in The Bahamas since 1987 in partnership with Professors Al Curran and Brian White of Smith College. Our primary location has been beautiful San Salvador Island, but we have worked as well on Great Inagua, Lee Stocking Island, and Long Island.

Drew Feucht ('05) worked with his advisor and Al Curran on Long Island in The Bahamas. Their project was the assessment of an unusual Holocene succession of carbonate sediments on that island, as well as the apparent moldic preservation of palm forests in eolianites.

Drew Feucht ('05) battling the waves on the windward shore of Long Island, The Bahamas (Spring 2004).

Allison Cornett ('00) has a webpage describing her petrologic and isotopic work on a sealevel event recorded by an erosion surface found to have been cut during Marine Isotope Stage 5e of the Pleistocene. It is well exposed in her field area of Great Inagua Island of The Bahamas.

Emily Griffin ('07) and Annie Steward ('07) recently completed their fieldwork on Great Inagua with their advisor and two other geologists: Al Curran of Smith College and Bill Thompson of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Our two goals were to further constrain the date of that 5e erosion surface first found on San Salvador Island, and to describe the ecological and facies succession on that surface as sealevel rose at the end of the event. Annie assisted Bill Thompson (a crack geochronologist who specializes in the radiometric dating of corals; here's an article on his recent work) in the collection of dozens of samples above and below the surface. Emily worked on the succession issue, also returning to Wooster with many samples. Here is a 1998 Lethaia paper describing the surface. We have a slide show of the Great Inagua trip now posted.

Siderastrea radians encrusting the Marine Isotope Stage 5e surface on the west side of Great Inagua Island, The Bahamas. These specimens are well-preserved because they were in a small niche underneath a larger patch reef. The March 2006 expedition to the island was in part to determine that age of the truncated coral underneath and the encrusting corals such as these.

Emily Griffin (left) and Annie Steward (right) catching a wave on the north shore of Great Inagua.

Sara Austin, Andrea Martin, and Jerome Hall, all of the Wooster class of 2002, worked on the same erosion surface and related phenomena on the north coast of Jamaica. We stayed at the Discovery Bay Marine Laboratory and had a great time finding exposures of the Pleistocene rocks on that tropical island. This study was featured in an article on undergraduate research in the August 31, 2001, issue of Science.

Andrea Martin ('02), Sara Austin ('02), and Jerome Hall ('02) sitting on Pleistocene rocks along the northern shore of Jamaica.

Mesozoic of the Middle East

Wooster students and faculty have had extraordinary opportunities lately to work on rocks and fossils in the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous of the Middle East. Our primary goal has been to study Mesozoic bioerosion and sclerobiont communities, but we have followed up on other ideas which have serendipitously appeared during our field and laboratory projects. Our Middle Eastern emphasis began in 1999 when Paul Taylor of the Natural History Museum (London) invited Mark Wilson to join him on a hard substrate community project in the Cretaceous of the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

Professor Mark Wilson in the United Arab Emirates with the Cretaceous Qahlah Formation in the background.

Megan Hooker ('00) studied the limestones and fossils from the Simsima Formation (Late Cretaceous) of the Oman Mountains to sort out paleoenvironments and ancient marine communities.

Our most recent Middle Eastern geological adventures have been in Israel. We have been working with Amihai Sneh and Yoav Avni of the Geological Survey of Israel on the beautiful Triassic and Jurassic exposures in the mahkteshim (breached anticlines, more or less) in the Negev Desert since a trip to Israel in 2003. During our 2004 expedition to Israel, Allison Mione ('05) collected and described a very strange bivalve from the Triassic of Mahktesh Ramon. Kevin Wolfe ('05) interpreted a remarkable Jurassic rocky shore preserved in Mahktesh Qatan (we've now published the work in the Israel Journal of Earth Sciences; here's a pdf). Allison is pictured on the header of this page sitting beside tidal channels of this fossil shoreline. Jeff Bowen ('06) participated in the 2005 Israel trip, studying a Jurassic hard substrate community found in Mahktesh Gadol. During our 2007 trip to Israel, Senior Independent Study students Meredith Sharpe ('08) and Sophie Lehmann ('08) also worked in Makhtesh Gadol measuring, describing and interpreting Middle Jurassic sediments and paleocommunities of the Matmor Formation.

Jeff Bowen ('06) collecting fossils in Mahktesh Gadol, Negev Desert, Israel.

Jurassic of England

We have long worked with Paul Taylor (Natural History Museum, London) and Tim Palmer (University of Wales, Aberystwyth) in the Jurassic of England, especially along the southern coast near Weymouth, Lyme Regis and the Isle of Portland. The Jurassic is a critical time in the evolution of hard substrate communities, and the diverse Jurassic rocks of southern England contain many shells and hardgrounds with well preserved borings and encrusters showing complex ecosystems in a calcite sea.

Isognomon bivalves attached to a gastropod in the Upper Jurassic of the Isle of Portland, southern England.

Katherine Nicholson ('03) worked on a fascinating community of Upper Jurassic encrusters in which their attaching undersides were exposed by dissolution of their aragonite host substrates. Here is Katherine's Senior I.S. PowerPoint presentation.

Katherine Nicholson ('03) with the giant ammonite Titanites on the Isle of Portland, southern England.

During our 2005 research trip to England, Erica Clites ('06) investigated the unusual stromatolites which encrusted the bases of tree trunks in the Late Jurassic Purbeck Forest preserved along the Dorset coast. Monica Umstead ('06) worked with the encrusters and borers, especially microborers, which inhabited oyster shells preserved in the black shales of the English Jurassic. Here are Erica's GSA presentation and Monica's Senior I.S. PowerPoint presentation.

Erica Clites ('06) and Monica Umstead ('06) on the Dorset coast, southern England.

Jurassic of Poland

In the summer of 2006 we began to explore the Jurassic sections of southern Poland with Michal Krobicki of the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków. Elyse Zavar ('07) did the bulk of her fieldwork in Zalas Quarry near Kraków, working on the dramatic transition in depositional environments and marine invertebrate communities between the Callovian and Oxfordian.

Elyse Zavar ('07) examining a mound created by the Jurassic bivalve Lopha in southern Poland.

We have posted a set of photographs from our 2006 expedition to Poland. Later this year we will post some of our research results.

Ordovician of North America and Europe

We are fortunate that Wooster is situated near some of the most fossiliferous rocks in the world: the Cincinnatian Series of the Upper Ordovician. These rocks are best exposed in the tri-state region of Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, easily reached with a three to five-hour drive from campus. We have concentrated our research on hard substrate communities, bioerosion, and the dissolution of biogenic aragonite concurrent with the development of carbonate hardgrounds during this Calcite Sea time. Much of this work has been done in collaboration with Paul Taylor (Natural History Museum, London) and Tim Palmer (University of Wales, Aberystwyth).

Encrusted and bored cobble from the Upper Ordovician of Kentucky.

Russ Kohrs ('01) studied a series of Cincinnatian encrusters and borers preserved "upside-down" when their host shells of aragonite dissolved away during early diagenesis. (An analogue with the work Katherine Nicholson ('03) did in the Jurassic of southern England.) Cordy Dennison-Budak ('07) analyzed borings in the Cincinnatian, especially those in bryozoans and brachiopods. She has been concentrating on the mysterious "half-borings". Andrew Milligan ('08) is studying the pattern of sclerobionts on the tests of the Middle Ordovician cystoid Echinosphaerites found in the kukersite oil shales of Estonia.

Aaron House ('04) and Andy Shields ('04) on an outcrop of the Ordovician exposed in southern Minnesota.

Miscellaneous Projects

Many paleontology and sed/strat I.S. students have done projects outside these areas of concentration. For example, Amanda Cook ('00) worked with Late Eocene butterflies and plants in the Florissant Formation of Colorado for her thesis. Jessica Conroy ('03) was part of a Keck Geology Consortium project looking at climate change proxies in Holocene bog deposits of Ireland. Jessica was especially interested in ecophenotypic change in the freshwater mollusk successions.

I had an excellent trip to the Baltics in June 2006, spending considerable time with the Ordovician of Estonia. Andy Milligan ('08) worked with me in Estonia and Ireland in July 2007 on his Senior I.S.

Additional Photographs --

Drew Feucht ('05), Jane Curran and Al Curran (Smith College) on Long Island, The Bahamas.

Monica Umstead ('06) in a quarry of Jurassic limestones (Isle of Portland, southern England).