Miocene clams

No, really.

Nick Pyenson came down to Santa Cruz yesterday for some paleo and marine biology action. We met Kena Fox-Dobbs* and Patrick Wheatley of the Koch lab at New Brighton state beach in Capitola to walk the cliffs and see if anything interesting was exposed. The whole coast here is Miocene Purissima Formation, and there are definitely fossil whales in there. But mostly, there are bivalves. Herewith, some photos.

*If the name sounds familiar, you may be thinking of her work on condor diets (see, e.g., Chamberlain et al. 2005).


The Purissima in all its shelly glory.



Summa dem shells.



Here's what a fault looks like. With Kena (l) and Nick (r) for scale.



And here's what a fault does to fossils. The technical term is "hamburgerization".

Stay tuned for photos of Nick and me playing with whales.

REFERENCES

Chamberlain, C.P., J.R. Waldbauer, K. Fox-Dobbs, S.D. Newsome, P.L. Koch, D.R. Smith, M.E. Church, S.D. Chamberlain, K.J. Sorenson, and R. Risebrough. 2005. Pleistocene to recent dietary shifts in California condors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 102(46):16707-11.