Fossiliferous

Within the confines of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park are one of the richest and most varied fossil repositories (for its time) in all the Western Hemisphere. The finds span most of the last 7 million years, and they include more than 550 types of plants and animals, ranging from microscopic pollen and water fleas to giant mammoths and ground sloths, ancient camels and jaguars, sabertooth cats, and the largest bird ever to fly over North America.  Though the advent of fall and cooler temperatures might make a trip to the desert begin to seem reasonable again, most visitors won’t discern much — if any — of this paleontological wealth. But I’ve discovered a wonderful key to accessing it. 

It’s Fossil Treasures of the Anza-Borrego Desert. Released a few years ago by that local trove of  natural scientific treasures, Sunbelt Publications, and edited by paleontologist George T. Jefferson and geologist Lowell Lindsay, the almost 400-page-long tome isn’t exactly bedside reading. Its 20 essays are highly technical, using language that verges at times on the impenetrable. But they’re gorgeously illustrated with hundreds of drawings, paintings, and photographs. These supplement specific points made in the text, but for me they also drive home a bigger message. The juxtaposition of so many fossils and fossil-fragment photos with drawings of the creatures from which they came serves as a bracing reminder of the staggering amounts of dry, dusty, painstaking field work — coupled with scientific sleuthing and deduction — that had to be carried out to advance our present knowledge of that 7 million-year-long story.

Evocative in a different way are five full-color paintings of paleolandscapes representing the way parts of the present-day park would have looked at times ranging from 1 to 5 million years ago. The next time I’m in the desert, they’ll help me summon up that lush teeming past.

If there’s more than I care to know about, say, the fossil ark shells of the Imperial Group or the intermediate tubucle near the articulation of Equus simplicidens‘s humerus with its scapula, the book also includes several excellent sub-essays on broader aspects of paleontology. How do you identify a 3-million-year-old piece of wood that’s turned into stone? What techniques do paleontologists currently use to date fossils? And why do scientists think all the local members of the camelid family (the richest assembly of pre-camels anywhere on earth) went extinct in North America?  Now I know.