RECENT FINDS AT THE ALWAYS WELCOME INN
ON-LINE CATALOG OF ALWAYS WELCOME INN FOSSILS NOW AVAILABLE
EOU alumna Story Miller created an Excel spreadsheet of the fossils that have been found at the Always Welcome Inn before she graduated in the spring of 2007. This catalog has been updated and is now available on-line! Thanks, Story!
Click on the link below to see the on-line list of Always Welcome Inn fossils:
Always Welcome Inn Fossils On-Line Catalog
June 1, 2011
EOU and Pine-Eagle High School students joined forces to dig fossils at the Always Welcome Inn for the fifth year in a row. Storms ringed the Baker Valley, but the weather cooperated and the finds were exciting! Lynn Langrell of the Always Welcome Inn started us off right when she gave us the carpometacarpus (wrist bone in the wing of a bird) of a rail, probably a gallinule according to Greg McDonald of the National Park Service. EOU's Jennifer Stewart found a vertebra that came from a 6-year old trout (possibly the bull trout, Salvelinus confluentus) according to Jerry Smith, the fossil fish expert from the University of Michigan. Ryan Rau and Robby McCutchen of Pine-Eagle found a lower right third premolar of a rabbit (Hypolagus) and some large pieces of turtle shell and Tristan Pierson and Aries Hood found a fibula of a small mammal. Leland Seggermab of Pine-Eagle found a section of the rib of a large antelope-sized mammal. This is the first large mammal fossil that we know for sure came from the Always Welcome Inn Pliocene sediments. What a great day!
Carpometacarpus of a rail (gallinule) found by Lynn Langrell (left); the vertebra of a trout found by Jennifer Stewart (center); and the lower right premolar of a rabbit found by Ryan Rau and Robby McCutcheon..
October 11, 2010
SUPERVOLCANO ASH FOUND AT THE ALWAYS WELCOME INN
It is exciting when your research leads to someone else coming to look at what you have found and then finds something new and exciting. That’s what happened in September 2010 when Dr. Barbara Nash, Professor of Geology & Geophysics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a well-known expert on the supervolcanoes of the Snake River Plain, analyzed some ash samples that she had collected at the Always Welcome Inn in 2009. Compositionally, the Always Welcome Inn ash is a dead ringer for the Kilgore ash, which was erupted from the Heise eruptive center in Idaho southwest of Yellowstone around 4.45 ± 0.05 million years ago.
Analyses of volcanic glass shards from the Always Welcome Inn by Barbara Nash, University of Utah, 10/11/2010, compared with analyses of the Kilgore Tuff: 4.45 ± 0.05 Ma (Bindeman et al., 2007, Geology)
The Kilgore tuff came from the Heise volcanic field just southwest of Yellowstone.
The Kilgore ash has a volume of approximately 1800 cu km, which places it in the supereruption category. The Kilgore ash may be the largest “light” (low-δ18O) tuff in the world. It is believed to have formed during the final stages of volcanism in the Heise caldera complex as the shallow, hydrothermally altered carapace surrounding the magma body beneath the complex remelted.
This discovery falls right in the middle of the ~4.8 - 4.3 million year age for the Always Welcome Inn deposits estimated from the voles in the sequence, which are very similar to the ~4.3 million year old voles at White Bluffs in the Hanford area but also have characteristics similar to the ~4.8 million year old voles in Alturas, California. Thanks to Barbara Nash’s work, the age of the Always Welcome Inn fossils is finally pinned down at 4.45 +/- 0.5 million years old.
May 26, 2010
The Pine Eagle students had set the bar high the week before, but our EOU students rose to the challenge the following week as storms rolled by all around them. Sarah Freeman found a beautiful vole upper second molar which she didn't know she had collected until she got back and looked at her samples the next day in the lab. Brandon Farner discovered a hare jaw fragment with a broken lower right third premolar in it. We think the hare may be related to Hypolagus ringoldensis, the hare found at the White Bluffs locality near Hanford, Washington. Unfortunately the jaw fell apart when it was being cleaned in the lab, but we have lots of pictures of it beforehand. Everyone had a great time!
Samantha McVicker and Bradley Savely (left) and Michelle Melchor (right) hunt for fossils.
Maury Crites shows how to brush fossils off the outcrop (left); the group poses in front of the outcrop (right).
Brannon Farner (left) and the lower right hare (Hypolagus ringoldensis?) jaw that he found (center and left).
Sarah Freeman (left) and Lisa Steinbach (right) hunt for fossils (left photo) and the upper left second molar of a vole that Sarah collected without knowing it (center and right photos).
May 21, 2010
Troy Tubbs and his students from Pine-Eagle High School came back to the Always Welcome Inn for the fourth year in a row and struck paydirt: A beautiful vole jaw, two vole teeth, a gopher tooth, two large bird bones, a sucker dentary, and much more! The largest bird bone came out in fragments but was originally at least 8 inches long!
Lower left vole jaw with incisor (broken), first molar, and second molar. Found by Troy Tubbs.
Two lower second vole molars found by Phoenix Millhouse (8th grade).
Gopher incisor (left) and baby sucker (Catastomus) maxilla found by Troy Tubbs.
Large bird(?) bone (left) and selected fragments of an 8 " long bird bone (right) found by Troy Tubbs.
September 11, 2009
This summer we concentrated our efforts on the east end of the Always Welcome Inn outcrop. Although the fossils are not as abundant as they are in the west end where we have dug in the past, we found some beautiful fish bones, including a sunfish left preopercle that is translucent on the edges. The preopercle is part of the sunfish skull. Jerry Smith, the fish expert from the University of Michigan, has designated this bone the holotype for the preopercle of the new species Archoplites oregonensis. This means that it is the best bone of its kind and will be used as the standard to compare preopercles of this species to other sunfish species.
EO-1188 Sunfish left preopercle (holotype) from 3.75-4 m above base of sequence at east end of outcrop. Scale is in millimeters.
We also found a small and slightly worn dentary (jawbone) from the sucker Catostomus cf. macrocheilus.
EO-1189 Dentary of a sucker from 4.25-4.5 m above base of sequence at east end of outcrop.
We found another bone that looks like it might be from a fish, but Jerry Smith didn't recognize it. We don't have the foggiest what it is!
EO-1190 Unknown bone from 6.25-6.5 m above base of sequence at east end of outcrop.
Other finds included a very nice bird bone found by Mark Ferns of the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries. We've only scratched the surface of what the east end of the outcrop has to offer!
May 29,2009
EOU and Pine-Eagle High School Students Combine Forces for Third Year
EOU and Pine-Eagle High School students combined forces for the third year in a row at the Always Welcome Inn and once again the results were great-- this was the year for finding fossils of babies!
Jenna Wright, two Pine-Eagle students, and Maggie the fossil dog search for fossils at the Always Welcome Inn.
Linda Harvey and Jay Van Tassell of EOU started things off by finding a fragment of the upper left jaw of a juvenile vole (Ophiomys). The jaw contains the second and third molars.
Linda Harvey and the fragment of the upper left jaw of a juvenile vole (Ophiomys) with second and third molars that she found at the Always Welcome Inn.
Marcella Bosch added another baby to the list when she found both the left and right maxillae (parts of the upper jaw) from a baby sucker (Catastomus). Holy Catastomatidae!
Marcella Bosch and the baby sucker maxillae that she found at the Always Welcome Inn.
Jacob Huff and Troy Tubbs of Pine-Eagle High School added a beautiful upper first molar from an adult vole (Ophiomys) to our collection of vole teeth. The dark coloring of this tooth is unlike any other that we have found. Lena McClelland found a broken vole tooth is a left upper first molar of a juvenile Ophiomys.
Jacob Huff's upper right first molar from the vole Ophiomys (left) and Lena McClelland's upper left first molar from an immature Ophiomys (right).
The Pine-Eagle students also found some great sunfish (Archoplites) bones, including a bone and a spine that are still articulated together.
Articulated sunfish bones found by Pine-Eagle students.
August 30, 2008
Second Vole Jaw Found at the Always Welcome Inn
Sometimes you find things in places where you don't expect them. That was what happened when Jay Van Tassell found a lower right jaw of the vole Ophiomys at the Always Welcome Inn during a recent sampling expedition. The jaw came from the lake beds in the lower part of the sequence, not the stream beds in the upper part where Greg McDonald found the first vole jaw found at the Always Welcome Inn and where all of our other vole molars have been found.
Lower right vole jaw found at the Always Welcome Inn outcrop.
The jaw includes the lower first and second molars, but the third molar and the incisor are missing. Another tooth, a lower left second molar, was also found in the same layer.
Why the vole jaw was deposited in the lake sequence is a puzzle. This may be evidence that the Always Welcome Inn vole is a water vole that swam in the lake waters and died there or perhaps the jaw was washed into the lake. Another possibility is that the jaw floated into the nearshore area of the lake as part of an owl pellet, which dissolved and fell apart, dropping the vole jaw on the lake bottom.
This find is important because the layer it was found in is repeated over and over again by faulting in the Always Welcome Inn outcrop, giving us a lot more places to look for vole fossils. We need more lower first and upper third molars to complete a statistically valid study of these voles and now we have a lot more places to look!
July 31, 2008
NEW FISH FOUND AT ALWAYS WELCOME INN
When we brought home the fish bones we had collected at the Always Welcome Inn on July 29th, we found some new bones that we didn't recognize. So we e-mailed some pictures of them to Jerry Smith, the fossil fish expert at the University of Michigan. He replied immediately: "You hit the jackpot: A sucker (Catostomus cf. macrocheilus) right maxilla, a piece of a Weberian apparatus, and a quadrate. The others are the basal remnants of pelvic pterygiophores. This is the pair of bones that the pelvic finrays attach to."
Right maxilla (upper jawbone) of the largescale river sucker Catostomus cf. macrocheilus.
Catostomus macrocheilus, also known as a largescale sucker, was first described from modern specimens collected in the Columbia River drainage at Astoria, Oregon. Diverse specimens occur in the ~3.9 million year-old Blufftop and ~2.9 million year-old Taunton faunas of the Ringold Formation near Hanford, Washington. The Ringold specimens grew to a length of about 35 centimeters, slightly smaller than their modern relatives. Catostomus macrocheilus has also been found in the late Pliocene and early Pleistocene deposits of the Snake River Plain (Smith and others, 2000). The Always Welcome Inn Catostomus is older than any of these, which means that we may have found the oldest known relative of today's Columbia River suckers. Holy Catostomidae!
Modern Catostomus macrocheilus.
Reference
Smith, G.R., Morgan, N., and Gustafson, E., 2000, Fishes of the Mio-Pliocene Ringold Formation, Washington: Pliocene capture of the Snake River by the Columbia River: University of Michigan Papers on Paleontology No. 32, 47 p.
June 4 , 2008
IMPORTANT NEW SUNFISH FOSSIL FOUND AT THE ALWAYS WELCOME INN
Eastern Oregon University biology professor Joe Corsini made an important discovery while looking for turtle fossils at the Always Welcome Inn on Wednesday, June 4, 2008. When Dr. Corsini carefully split open a piece of diatomite from the lower portion of the sequence, he found a large, transluscent, and very delicate sunfish bone called an "opercle." An opercle is a bone in the back of a fish's skull near the gills.
When we sent pictures of the opercle to Dr. Jerry Smith, the fossil fish expert at the University of Michigan, he quickly answered: "The opercle is a remarkable specimen that enables a new view of Archoplites evolution. It is most like the Chalk Hills Archoplites, but different. It should also help us understand the two species in the Glenns Ferry formation and two at AWI. This specimen is the most important ever, because of its unbroken condition. I am getting out all of the opercles I can find here."
Archoplites is the genus that sunfish belong to. The Chalk Hill Formation was deposited during the late Miocene (~9-6 Ma) stage of Lake Idaho and the Glenns Ferry Formation was deposited during the Pliocene (~6-2 Ma) stage of Lake Idaho. It looks like the sunfish opercle in the Always Welcome Inn sequence, which is ~4.8-4.3 m.y.-old, is an important piece that fills in a gap in the sunfish evolution puzzle!
Sunfish opercle found by Dr. Joe Corsini. The scale bar is in millimeters.
May 27, 2008
FOSSIL PASSERINE HUMERUS FOUND AT ALWAYS WELCOME INN
Last year, students from Pine-Eagle High School discovered a fossil beaver jaw and duck bones at the Always Welcome Inn. This year they continued their streak of finds when Tyrah Steele found an almost perfectly preserved left bird humerus. According to Dr. David Steadman of the Florida State Museum, the bone is from a passerine, a group that includes modern songbirds. Passerine fossils are very rare in rocks older than Pleistocene; only 8 genera have been described from the Tertiary period (Brodkorb, 1978).
The passerine humerus measures only 15.2 mm from tip to tip. Our best guess is that the bone resembles a swallow humerus found in the ~4.8-4.3 million-year old Fox Canyon local fauna of Kansas illustrated by Feduccia (1967). We think that the Always Welcome Inn sequence is the same age as the Fox Canyon local fauna based on the voles, so this is a good match, agewise.
Look at the photos below and judge for yourself. Is the bone that Tyrah found a swallow bone? If so, it isn't hard to visualize swallows flying above the waters of the lake that once occupied the Always Welcome Inn site. Perhaps these Pliocene birds are relatives of the bank swallows that live in the outcrop today?
Brodkorb, P., 1978, Catalogue of fossil birds, part 5 (Passeriformes), Bulletin of the Florida State Museum, Biological Sciences, v. 23, no. 3, p. 139-228.
Feduccia, A., 1967, A new swallow from the Fox Canyon local fauna (Upper Pliocene) of Kansas: Condor, v. 69, p. 526-527.