Endless Shells

Turitellas

Today, for the first time this week, we made a journey out to the field! And let me tell you, it was hot as hell. We left early to avoid working into the late afternoon, when things really become sweltering, but even by 9:00 am I could feel the sun beating down on the back of my neck. We revisited the sites that we had struggled to find last week, to discover that we had been SO CLOSE! In most cases just a block or two off from the road that would take us to the outcrops. These sites, all of which belong to the Gatun Formation (late Miocene, maybe 10 million years old), were chucky-jam-full of these snail shells called Turitellas. Chucky-jam-full is a professional term (I swear, it's used in research papers!) that boils down to: we couldn't look at the rock without seeing these things. However, we were interested in vertebrate remains, which were much harder to come by. After scouring three sites for a total of nearly six hours, though, we did manage to find: shark teeth, otoliths (fish ear bones), ray combs (feeding parts), fish vertebrae, turtle carapace, and an entire auguti skeleton (extant, of course). So it was a pretty successful day, really, and it actually felt good to be out digging and sweating under the relentless Panamanian sun.

Fossilized plant material