![]() ![]() Their fossils are often sold in rock shops because their beautiful undulating suture lines make them aesthetically pleasing items. Ammonites are a completely extinct group of hard-shelled cephalopods, related to the modern-day squid, octopus, and nautilus. To that extent, I was interested in photographing and documenting a portion of the vast numbers of ammonites the two institutions have amassed over the years. By more closely examining natural experiments in the past when biota encountered widespread novel physical conditions, we can better inform our predictions of how organisms will respond to the rapid global change happening today. My work focuses on the faunal dynamics associated with invasion into these shallow sea environments. The Western Interior Seaway was a widespread shallow sea that flooded the North American continent from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean during the Late Cretaceous Period (about 100 to 65 million years ago). Though these collections cover a wide range of organisms from all over the world, my purpose there was to visit the fossil collections from the Western Interior Seaway. The Museum of Natural History is located at the University of Colorado campus in scenic Boulder, Colorado. The building is also a repository for a large collection of soil samples and approximately 1.7 million feet of drilled rock, sediment, and ice cores. The USGS collections are housed in the Core Research Center on the Denver Federal Center campus. ![]() In July 2013, I visited the Denver, Colorado, area to collect data from two collections housed at United States Geological Survey (USGS) facilities and the University of Colorado (CU) Museum of Natural History. ![]()
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