While the Minoan culture on Crete was just beginning, woolly mammoths were disappearing from St. Paul Island, Alaska, according to an international team of scientists who have dated this extinction to 5,600 years ago.
"It's amazing that everything turned out so precisely with dating of extinction at 5,600 plus or minus 100 years," said Russell Graham, professor of geosciences, Penn State."
St. Paul Island lies about 400 miles north of the Aleutian Islands and was part of the Bering Land Bridge before sea level rose when the last glacial period ended. Previous researchers radiocarbon-dated remains of five mammoths to about 6,480 years ago, but there was no way to know if these were the last five animals.
The researchers used a variety of proxies to date the demise of the mammoths on the island. Proxies are things in the environment that can be used to independently document the presence of an organism, even though they are not parts of it. In this study, three different spores from fungi that grow on large animal dung were extracted from lake cores and used to determine when the mammoths were no longer on the island. Proxies in sediments from cores from a lake near the cave were used to determine the time of the demise of the mammoth population.
New projections of permafrost change in northern Alaska suggest far-reaching effects will come sooner than expected, scientists reported this week at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
"The temperature of permafrost is rapidly changing," said Vladimir Romanovsky, head of the Permafrost Laboratory at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.
"For the last 30 years, the mean annual ground temperature at the top of permafrost on the North Slope has been rising," Romanovsky said. The mean annual ground temperature -- an average of all of the years' highs and lows at the Deadhorse research site -- was 17.6 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 8 degrees Celsius) in 1988, and now it's 28.5 F (minus 2 C). Researchers expect the average annual ground temperature to reach 32 F (0 C), the melting point of ice, in many areas.
"We believe this will be before 2100 at many locations within the North Slope," Romanovsky said.
Romanovsky and his team, including UAF's Dmitry Nicolsky and Santosh Panda, entered data from several models, as well as their own on-the-ground observations, into the Geophysical Institute Permafrost Laboratory model, which primarily examines effects of climate and surface disturbances on permafrost.
They projected what would happen to permafrost in two possible scenarios.
A moderate scenario assumes worldwide carbon dioxide emissions will continue to decline at the modest rate they are now. This will lead to carbon dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere leveling off by roughly 2050 and staying constant until the end of the century.
"In this scenario we will see substantial thawing of permafrost on Alaska's North Slope, but only in certain areas, particularly the foothills north of the Brooks Range," Romanovsky said.
The extreme scenario assumes worldwide carbon dioxide emissions continue at today's rates. In that case, permafrost thawing on the North Slope will be much more significant and will extend beyond the foothills and into the Arctic coastal plain, Romanovsky said. In this outcome, the results at 2050 would be similar to the outcome in the moderate scenario, but after 2050 permafrost thawing would accelerate. More than half of the permafrost on the North Slope would be thawing by 2100 in this scenario.
"Under these conditions, the permafrost will become unstable beneath any infrastructure such as roads, pipelines and buildings," Romanovsky said. "The result will be dramatic effects on infrastructure and ecosystems."
Mid-Pleistocene climate transition drives net mass loss from rapidly uplifting St. Elias Mountains, Alaska
Authors:
Gulick et al
Abstract:
Erosion, sediment production, and routing on a tectonically active continental margin reflect both tectonic and climatic processes; partitioning the relative importance of these processes remains controversial. Gulf of Alaska contains a preserved sedimentary record of the Yakutat Terrane collision with North America. Because tectonic convergence in the coastal St. Elias orogen has been roughly constant for 6 My, variations in its eroded sediments preserved in the offshore Surveyor Fan constrain a budget of tectonic material influx, erosion, and sediment output. Seismically imaged sediment volumes calibrated with chronologies derived from Integrated Ocean Drilling Program boreholes show that erosion accelerated in response to Northern Hemisphere glacial intensification (∼2.7 Ma) and that the 900-km-long Surveyor Channel inception appears to correlate with this event. However, tectonic influx exceeded integrated sediment efflux over the interval 2.8–1.2 Ma. Volumetric erosion accelerated following the onset of quasi-periodic (∼100-ky) glacial cycles in the mid-Pleistocene climate transition (1.2–0.7 Ma). Since then, erosion and transport of material out of the orogen has outpaced tectonic influx by 50–80%. Such a rapid net mass loss explains apparent increases in exhumation rates inferred onshore from exposure dates and mapped out-of-sequence fault patterns. The 1.2-My mass budget imbalance must relax back toward equilibrium in balance with tectonic influx over the timescale of orogenic wedge response (millions of years). The St. Elias Range provides a key example of how active orogenic systems respond to transient mass fluxes, and of the possible influence of climate-driven erosive processes that diverge from equilibrium on the million-year scale.
Evolution is usually thought of as occurring over long time periods, but it also can happen quickly. Consider a tiny fish whose transformation after the 1964 Alaskan earthquake was uncovered by University of Oregon scientists and their University of Alaska collaborators.
The fish, seawater-native threespine stickleback, in just decades experienced changes in both their genes and visible external traits such as eyes, shape, color, bone size and body armor when they adapted to survive in fresh water. The earthquake -- 9.2 on the Richter scale and second highest ever recorded -- caused geological uplift that captured marine fish in newly formed freshwater ponds on islands in Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska south of Anchorage.
The findings -- detailed in a paper available online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences -- are important for understanding the impacts of sudden environmental change on organisms in nature, says UO biologist William Cresko, whose lab led the National Science Foundation-funded research.
Reconstructing the paleohydrology of a cretaceous Alaskan paleopolar coastal plain from stable isotopes of bivalves
Authors:
Suarez et al
Abstract:
As global mean annual temperatures continue to rise, modern Arctic climates are changing at an incredibly fast rate. To predict changing climate dynamics, a number of researchers have been focused on characterizing Arctic climate from ancient greenhouse worlds such as the Cretaceous and Eocene. Characterization of these climates requires analysis of a variety of proxy materials. Here we use bivalve shells, identified as Nucula aff. Nucula percrassa Conrad, from the Cretaceous (early Maastrichtian) Prince Creek Formation in combination with isotope data from previous lithologic and isotopic studies to characterize a cool-house Cretaceous climate bounded by greenhouse climates (mid-Cretaceous thermal maximum and Late Paleocene climate). Bivalves were analyzed by powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD), cathodoluminescence (CL), and thin section petrography to determine mineralogy and integrity of shells. PXRD analysis indicates that shells are composed of primary aragonite and not secondary calcite. Thin section and CL images reveal well preserved shell morphology including daily growth lines, and no luminescent patches or coarsening of crystal sizes to indicate diagenetic alteration/recrystallization. Aragonite carbon isotopic composition (δ13Carag) range from + 0.45‰ to − 3.00‰ VPDB and average − 1.58‰. Aragonite oxygen isotopic composition (δ18Oarag) range from − 10.48‰ to − 15.42‰ VPDB and average − 12.83‰. Using temperatures from 4.5 °C to 12.5 °C, the salinity–δ18Owater relationship of a modern Arctic setting from Torres et al. (2011), and the water–aragonite equation of Grossman and Ku (1986) reveal salinity ranges between 8 and 17.7 ppt. Using these salinity ranges and temperatures, N. percrassa precipitated shell aragonite from water that ranged between δ18Owater = − 14.41‰ VSMOW (at 12.5 °C) and − 16.23‰ (at 4.5 °C). Shell growth was in equilibrium with water that represents a coastal, mixed water setting such as an estuary. When combined with previous studies, the mixture of fresh:marine water represents a 50%:50% to 72%:28% mixture and ranged between − 14.41‰ and − 16.23‰ during spring to summer months.
Crayfish burrows from the latest Cretaceous lower Cantwell Formation (Denali National Park, Alaska): Their morphology and paleoclimatic significance
Authors:
Fiorillo et al
Abstract:
Latest Cretaceous strata of the lower Cantwell Formation, Denali National Park, central Alaska Range, contain an abundance of megafloral remains and invertebrate and vertebrate trace fossils. Though dominated by herbivorous dinosaur footprints, the abundance and diversity of fossil bird tracks are unique. We present newly discovered crayfish burrows from several areas along a 50 km transect with Denali National Park. Most crayfish burrows from the lower Cantwell Formation are preserved only in cross-section and range from approximately 5–10 cm in diameter. Where preserved in full relief and terminations present, burrow depth is generally less than 50 cm. Burrow morphology is similar to burrow morphology of modern freshwater crayfish (Cambaridae).
The Cantwell Formation fills the Cantwell Basin, a 135 km-long and up to 35 km-wide, east–west trending basin, bracketed by the Hines Creek Fault to the north and the McKinley Fault to the south. Basin fill comprises up to 4000 m of continental deposits, interpreted as braided rivers, alluvial fans, floodplains, swamps, and ponds.
Crayfish burrows provide evidence of water table level, soil moisture fluctuations, as well as insight into mean annual temperatures at the time of deposition of the lower Cantwell Formation, a Late Cretaceous high-latitude paleoecosystem. Despite a relatively high latitudinal setting (~ 71°N paleolatitude), the Late Cretaceous (i.e., Campanian–Maastrichtian) mean annual temperature, based on the distribution of similar present-day crayfish burrows, was more like that of southernmost Ontario, Canada, where the northernmost burrowing crayfish are found today. The burrow depth suggests (1) no permafrost was present, and (2) the phreatic zone was ~ 30–50 cm below the paleo-ground surface. Based on the presence of these crayfish burrows, the paleoclimate is interpreted as humid continental (Köppen scheme), with average summer high temperatures between 25 °C and 28 °C and average winter low temperatures between − 6 °C and 0 °C. These estimates compare somewhat favorably with previous CLAMP estimates of a warm monthly mean temperature of 17.08 +/− 1.6 °C and a cold monthly mean temperature of − 2.31 +/− 1.9 °C.
Terrestrial isotopic evidence for a Middle-Maastrichtian warming event from the lower Cantwell Formation, Alaska
Authors:
Salazar-Jaramillo et al
Abstract:
Carbon stable isotope data (δ13C) and new radiometric dates indicate that the non-marine Late Cretaceous lower Cantwell Formation, central Alaska, registers the Middle-Maastrichtian Event (MME), a global warming episode. A stratigraphic section measured at the East Fork of the Toklat River in Denali National Park & Preserve includes a bentonite layer that we have dated to 69.5 ± 0.7 Ma using U–Pb isotope analysis of zircons. The new depositional age confirms that dinosaur tracks from the lower Cantwell Formation are coeval with dinosaur bones from outcrops of the Prince Creek Formation on Alaska's North Slope. δ13C data from fossil wood recovered from the lower Cantwell Formation records an ~ 3‰ positive excursion correlative with positive excursions from terrestrial and marine sections in West Texas (USA) and Gubbio (Italy), respectively. The similarity between marine and terrestrial records suggests that this excursion is the result of a major perturbation in the global carbon cycle, known as the Middle-Maastrichtian Event (MME). Mean annual precipitation (MAP) estimates calculated from δ13C data yield a range of 168–470 mm/yr during the MME, 353–1050 mm/yr before and 475–1451 mm/yr after the warming event. The δ13C record from the lower Cantwell Formation provides the first terrestrial high-latitude evidence for the MME, while MAP estimates for the coeval Prince Creek Formation suggest that the arctic coast may have been more humid than southern interior Alaska during the Middle Maastrichtian.
During Patrick Druckenmiller's not-so-restful sabbatical year, he is flying to museums around the world. In Alberta a few weeks ago and London now, the University of Alaska Museum's curator of earth science is looking at bones of dinosaurs similar to ones found in northern Alaska. The more he squints at them and chats with experts, the more he thinks far-north dinosaurs are like Alaskans compared to other Americans: kind of the same, but a little off.
"When we really reexamine the fauna, (northern Alaska) is a very weird place," Druckenmiller said.
The mini tyrannosaur, duck-billed swamp-stompers, armor-headed planteaters and other dinosaurs found in northern Alaska hint of a story that is theirs alone. That tale is separate from the one we learned as kids, told by fossils found in Montana, Alberta, Mongolia and other more-exposed and easier-to-get-to places.
Druckenmiller's examinations of the duckbilled dinosaurs found in Alberta led to the recent declaration of a new Alaska hadrosaur species due to slight but significant differences in body structure.
"They're close but they're different," Druckenmiller said. "It's true for fish, dinosaurs and mammals. There's no obvious gene flow between areas."
Early human use of anadromous salmon in North America at 11,500 y ago
Authors:
Halffman et al
Abstract:
Salmon represented a critical resource for prehistoric foragers along the North Pacific Rim, and continue to be economically and culturally important; however, the origins of salmon exploitation remain unresolved. Here we report 11,500-y-old salmon associated with a cooking hearth and human burials from the Upward Sun River Site, near the modern extreme edge of salmon habitat in central Alaska. This represents the earliest known human use of salmon in North America. Ancient DNA analyses establish the species as Oncorhynchus keta (chum salmon), and stable isotope analyses indicate anadromy, suggesting that salmon runs were established by at least the terminal Pleistocene. The early use of this resource has important implications for Paleoindian land use, economy, and expansions into northwest North America.
Genetic testing of Iñupiat people currently living in Alaska's North Slope is helping Northwestern University scientists fill in the blanks on questions about the migration patterns and ancestral pool of the people who populated the North American Arctic over the last 5,000 years.
"This is the first evidence that genetically ties all of the Iñupiat and Inuit populations from Alaska, Canada and Greenland back to the Alaskan North Slope," said Northwestern's M. Geoffrey Hayes, senior author of the new study to be published April 29, 2015, in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
In this study, all mitochondrial DNA haplogroups previously found in the ancient remains of Neo- and Paleo-Eskimos and living Inuit peoples from across the North American Arctic were found within the people living in North Slope villages.
These findings support the archaeological model that the "peopling of the eastern Arctic" began in the North Slope, in an eastward migration from Alaska to Greenland. It also provides new evidence to support the hypothesis that there were two major migrations to the east from the North Slope at two different times in history.
"There has never been a clear biological link found in the DNA of the Paleo-Eskimos, the first people to spread from Alaska into the eastern North American arctic, and the DNA of Neo-Eskimos, a more technologically sophisticated group that later spread very quickly from Alaska and the Bering Strait region to Greenland and seemed to replace the Paleo-Eskimo," Hayes said.
"Our study suggests that the Alaskan North Slope serves as the homeland for both of those groups, during two different migrations. We found DNA haplogroups of both ancient Paleo-Eskimos and Neo-Eskimos in Iñupiat people living in the North Slope today."
DINOSAUR-BEARING HYPERCONCENTRATED FLOWS OF CRETACEOUS ARCTIC ALASKA: RECURRING CATASTROPHIC EVENT BEDS ON A DISTAL PALEOPOLAR COASTAL PLAIN
Authors:
Flaig et al
Abstract:
The Cretaceous coastal plain of Arctic Alaska contains the richest concentration of high-latitude dinosaurs on Earth. Three bonebeds (Liscomb, Byers, Sling Point) are found in paleopolar (82°–85° N) coastal-plain deposits of the Prince Creek Formation on Alaska's North Slope. 40Ar/39Ar analysis of a tuff below the oldest bonebed (Sling Point) returned an age of 69.2 ± 0.5 Ma indicating a maximum early Maastrichtian age for these bonebeds. Bonebeds are overwhelmingly dominated by partially articulated to associated late-stage juvenile Edmontosaurus sp. Bone is rarely found in channels; instead high-density accumulations are preserved on floodplains in laterally extensive, muddy alluvium. Bone size grading is vertically nonuniform and most bones are in hydraulic disequilibrium with the surrounding clay-rich matrix. Bones exhibit little evidence of rounding, weathering, predation, or trampling, suggesting short-distance transport and rapid burial. Because these bonebeds are unlike typical debris-flow or streamflow deposits, the mechanism for bonebed emplacement remained poorly understood. All bonebeds contain a current-rippled siltstone containing the largest bone overlain by a distinctive mudstone encasing smaller bones, bone fragments, and subparallel-aligned plant fragments that appear “frozen in flow” within the muddy matrix. We recognize that these bonebeds exhibit a recurring facies pairing and bipartite division of flow consistent with deposition by fine-grained viscous hyperconcentrated flows. We suggest that exceptional discharge events entrained mud and ash stored on point bars and floodplains, increasing suspended-sediment concentrations in rivers and generating erosive hyperconcentrated flows that transported the remains of scores of juvenile dinosaurs onto floodplains adjacent to distributary channels.
The remains of two Ice Age infants, buried more than 11,000 years ago at a site in Alaska, represent the youngest human remains ever found in northern North America, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The site and its artifacts provide new insights into funeral practices and other rarely preserved aspects of life among people who inhabited the area thousands of years ago, according to Ben Potter, a researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the paper's lead author.
Potter led the archaeological team that made the discovery in fall of 2013 at an excavation of the Upward Sun River site, near the Tanana River in central Alaska. The researchers worked closely with local and regional Native tribal organizations as they conducted their research. The National Science Foundation funded the work.
Potter and his colleagues note that the human remains and associated burial offerings, as well as inferences about the time of year the children died and were buried, could lead to new thinking about how early societies were structured, the stresses they faced as they tried to survive, how they treated the youngest members of their society, and how they viewed death and the importance of rituals associated with it.
Potter made the new find on the site of a 2010 excavation, where the cremated remains of another 3-year-old child were found. The bones of the two infants were found in a pit directly below a residential hearth where the 2010 remains were found.
"Taken collectively, these burials and cremation reflect complex behaviors related to death among the early inhabitants of North America," Potter said.
An Upper Triassic (Norian) ichthyosaur (Reptilia, Ichthyopterygia) from northern Alaska and dietary insight based on gut contents
Authors:
Druckenmiller et al
Abstract:
In 1950, the partial skeleton of a large vertebrate was discovered in the western Brooks Range of Alaska by a team of geologists mapping the U.S. Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4 (now National Petroleum Reserve—Alaska). Because the preserved portion of the specimen was large (approximately 4 m in length) and found in an extremely remote location (Fig. 1), it was not collected at the time of discovery, although the site was subsequently revisited at later dates by geologists familiar with the find. A brief note mentioning the skeleton and its probable age was published 23 years later (Tailleur et al., 1973); however, the identity of the skeleton as an ichthyosaur, though suspected, was equivocal. In 2002, the specimen was relocated and collected by a team from the University of Alaska Museum, where it is now housed.
Pterosaur tracks from the Lower Cantwell Formation (Campanian–Maastrichtian) of Denali National Park, Alaska, USA, with comments about landscape heterogeneity and habit preferences
Authors:
Fiorillo et al
Abstract:
We report on new records of pterosaur tracks from Alaska. Recent palaeontological investigations in the Lower Cantwell Formation of Denali National Park, central Alaska Range, Alaska, had resulted previously in the discovery of a single pterosaur manus track. Subsequent and ongoing investigation has shown that the track record for pterosaurs in this region is more robust. These new pterosaur records comprise large and small traces. The larger tracks are up to approximately 18 cm long and 6 cm wide. The smaller tracks are approximately 6 cm long and 4 cm wide. The assemblage of pterosaur traces from Denali National Park consists of manus impressions. The morphology of the pterosaur traces found in the Lower Cantwell Formation compares favourably with the morphology of the ichnogenus Pteraichnus. The presence of two very different body sizes of pterosaurs, along with the abundant record of fossil bird tracks, indicates the presence of ecological complexity among aerial vertebrates during the time that the sediments of the Lower Cantwell Formation were deposited. Sedimentological and palaeobotanical data, combined with the vertebrate ichnology record, offer details into how these aerial vertebrates were separated within this heterogenetic ecosystem.
Herd structure in Late Cretaceous polar dinosaurs: A remarkable new dinosaur tracksite, Denali National Park, Alaska, USA
Authors:
Fiorillo et al
Abstract:
The discovery of a new tracksite of mostly hadrosaurid dinosaur footprints, made by a herd living in an ancient high-latitude continental ecosystem, provides insight into the herd structure and behavior of northern polar dinosaurs and perspective on populations of large-bodied herbivores in an Arctic greenhouse world. This tracksite occurs in the Upper Cretaceous Cantwell Formation in the Alaska Range (Denali National Park, Alaska, United States), and it is the largest tracksite known from this far north. Preservation of the tracksite is exceptional: most tracks, regardless of size, contain skin impressions and they co-occur with well-preserved plant fossils and invertebrate trace fossils of terrestrial and aquatic insects. Statistical analyses of the tracks show that individuals of four different age classes of hadrosaurids lived together in a large social group. Our research results independently corroborate the growth curve for hadrosaurids proposed by paleohistologists that suggests that these dinosaurs experienced a period of rapid growth early in their life history.
Great tsunamigenic earthquakes during the past 1000 yr on the Alaska megathrust
Authors:
Shennan et al
Abstract:
Large to great earthquakes and related tsunamis generated on the Alaska megathrust produce major hazards for both the area of rupture and heavily populated coastlines around much of the Pacific Ocean. Recent modeling studies suggest that single-segment ruptures, as well as multi-segment, 1964-type ruptures, can produce great earthquakes, >M8, and significant hazards both in the near field and to distant locations through the generation of tsunamis. We present new paleoseismological data from Kodiak Island and a new analysis of radiocarbon data based on Bayesian age modeling to combine our observations with previous geological, historical, and archaeological investigations. We suggest that, in addition to multi-segment ruptures in A.D. 1964 and 1020–1150 (95% age estimate), a single-segment rupture occurred in 1788, with coseismic land-surface deformation across Kodiak Island and a tsunami that is recorded in historical documents and in sediment sequences, and another, similar rupture of the same Kodiak segment at A.D. 1440–1620. These indicate shorter intervals between ruptures of the Kodiak segment than previously assumed, and more frequent ruptures than for the Prince William Sound segment.
A Diminutive New Tyrannosaur from the Top of the World
Authors:
Fiorillo et al
Abstract:
Tyrannosaurid theropods were dominant terrestrial predators in Asia and western North America during the last of the Cretaceous. The known diversity of the group has dramatically increased in recent years with new finds, but overall understanding of tyrannosaurid ecology and evolution is based almost entirely on fossils from latitudes at or below southern Canada and central Asia. Remains of a new, relatively small tyrannosaurine were recovered from the earliest Late Maastrichtian (70-69Ma) of the Prince Creek Formation on Alaska's North Slope. Cladistic analyses show the material represents a new tyrannosaurine species closely related to the highly derived Tarbosaurus+Tyrannosaurus clade. The new taxon inhabited a seasonally extreme high-latitude continental environment on the northernmost edge of Cretaceous North America. The discovery of the new form provides new insights into tyrannosaurid adaptability, and evolution in an ancient greenhouse Arctic.
Towards Space Solar Power - Examining Atmospheric Interactions of Power Beams with the HAARP Facility
Authors:
Leitgab and Cowley
Abstract:
In the most common space solar power (SSP) system architectures, solar energy harvested by large satellites in geostationary orbit is transmitted to Earth via microwave radiation. Currently, only limited information about the interactions of microwave beams with energy densities of several tens to hundreds of W/m2 with the different layers of the atmosphere is available. Governmental bodies will likely require detailed investigations of safety and atmospheric effects of microwave power beams before issuing launch licenses for SSP satellite systems. This paper proposes to collect representative and comprehensive data of the interaction of power beams with the atmosphere by extending the infrastructure of the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facility in Alaska, USA. Estimates of the transmission infrastructure performance as well as measurement devices and scientific capabilities of possible upgrade scenarios will be discussed. The proposed upgrade of the HAARP facility is expected to deliver a wealth of data and information which could serve as a decision base for governmental launch licensing of SSP satellites, and which can be used in addition to deepen public acceptance of SSP as a large-scale renewable energy source.
An ancient forest has thawed from under a melting glacier in Alaska and is now exposed to the world for the first time in more than 1,000 years.
Stumps and logs have been popping out from under southern Alaska's Mendenhall Glacier — a 36.8-square-mile (95.3 square kilometers) river of ice flowing into a lake near Juneau — for nearly the past 50 years. However, just within the past year or so, researchers based at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau have noticed considerably more trees popping up, many in their origi
"Researchers have collected pieces of wood to date using radiocarbon dating techniques, and have found in their original upright position and some still bearing roots and even a bit of bark, the Juneau Empire first reported last week.
"There are a lot of them, and being in a growth position is exciting because we can see the outermost part of the tree and count back to see how old the tree was," Cathy Connor, a geology professor at the University of Alaska Southeast who was involved in the investigation, told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. "Mostly, people find chunks of wood helter-skelter, but to see these intact upright is kind of cool."
The team has tentatively identified the trees as either spruce or hemlock, based on the diameter of the trunks and because these are the types of trees growing in the region today, Connor said, but the researchers still need to further assess the samples to verify the tree type.
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