Hairy Museum of Natural History

Back at the end of June, I jumped at the chance to dig up some fossils in northern New Mexico with a team of researchers, associates, & volunteers from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. We set up camp in historic Cobre Cañon, whose rocks date from the latest Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian) through to the Early Permian, which makes the rocks that form the canyon about 300,000,000 years old—a good 75,000,000 years older than the earliest dinosaurs.

During the day we baked under the summer sun, finding and excavating the fossils that had worked their way to the surface after having having been preserved in rock and mud for more than a quarter-billion years. In the evenings around the fire, we looked around the canyon and thought about what today’s dry New Mexico terrain would have been like back then. It was nearly on the equator then, and even hotter. It would have been wetter, too, at least during the rainy seasons when the rivers would rise, heavy with sediments carried down from the Ancestral Rocky Mountains pushing up to the north.

The rivers would haved enriched forests of tree ferns and giant horsetails. A visitor from modern North America would be hard-pressed to find a familiar tree, or a terrestrial vertebrate that would look out of place in a zoo’s Reptile House.

A visitor without the benefit of a few thousand millennia of hindsight might not think much of the vertebrates at all. The invertebrates would have been much more visible, and, in that oxygen-rich world, much larger. Giant, eight-foot-long millipedes would have been the largest animals around, and, to our ancestors’ dismay, they might have even been at the top of the food chain.

Inspired by fossils and conversation, I began a sketchbook of Permocarboniferous studies, to both familiarize myself with this distant world and plan some larger pieces to portray that time. I’ve created a gallery of the sketches here, and will update it with new sketches and finished pieces as time goes by.

I’d encourage anyone interested in this time and place to look into The Nonmarine Permian Symposium being put on this October at the NMMNHS.

I’m indebted to Dr. Spencer Lucas for setting up the trip, inviting me along, and encouraging the artwork. NMMNHS Preparator Larry Rinehart provided excellent conversation, enthusiasm, and showed remarkable understanding when my initial attempts at quarrying met with mixed success. Dan Chaney gave me a crash course in the relevant paleobotany, and Susan Harris patiently taught me how to see Paleozoic fossils. Josh Smith, Kevin Madalena, and Paul Sealy all graciously shared their thoughts and expertise in the field.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Carboniferous, Permian, The Day Job.