Century-old fossil mystery put to rest.The fossil Hallopus made quite a splash in 1877 when famed paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh Othniel Charles Marsh (October 29, 1831 - March 18, 1899) was one of the pre-eminent paleontologists of the 19th century, who discovered and named many fossils found in the American West. Marsh was born in Lockport, New York. described it as a tiny, birdlike dinosaur. But the fiercely competitive Marsh went to his grave without revealing where collectors had unearthed Unearthed is the name of a Triple J project to find and "dig up" (hence the name) hidden talent in regional Australia. Unearthed has had three incarnations - they first visited each region of Australia where Triple J had a transmitter - 41 regions in all. this unique specimen. By combining modern analytical techniques with some old-fashioned detective work, two paleontologists and a geologist have now resolved the Hallopus enigma. Marsh himself described the fossil as coming from the lower Jurassic rock formations (about 200 million years old) in Colorado, getting no more specific than that. But he considered the rocks important enough to coin the name Hallopus beds after the sandstone in which it was found. The site remained a mystery until 1991, when Kenneth Carpenter For the American cyclist, see . Kenneth Carpenter (born September 21, 1949 in Tokyo, Japan) is a Paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Natural History and author or co-author of a number of books on dinosaurs and Mesozoic life. of the Denver Museum of Natural History began studying century-old quarries near Garden Park, Colo. Using a one-sentence description in archival records from Yale University Yale University, at New Haven, Conn.; coeducational. Chartered as a collegiate school for men in 1701 largely as a result of the efforts of James Pierpont, it opened at Killingworth (now Clinton) in 1702, moved (1707) to Saybrook (now Old Saybrook), and in 1716 was (where Marsh had worked), Carpenter located a layer of rock beneath a distinctive cone-shaped hill. He sent a sample of the rock to Yale's John H. Ostrom and Jay J. Ague ague (a´gu) 1. a chill. 2. old name for malaria. a·gue n. 1. . By comparing the abundances of various elements and minerals in the rock, Ague and Ostrom determined that Carpenter's sample matched the Hallopus rock exactly. They later found confirming evidence in a letter, written to Marsh in 1877, describing in detail where collectors had found the fossil. In the January AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SCIENCE The American Journal of Science (AJS) is America's longest-running journal, having been published continuously since its conception in 1818, by Professor Benjamin Silliman, who edited and financed it himself. , the three researchers report that Hallopus actually came from the upper Jurassic, about 40 to 50 million years later than Marsh had suggested. That's not the only error he made about Hallopus. Work in 1970 revealed the animal's true identity as a long-legged crocodile, not a dinosaur at all. |
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