| Visit a remote fossil leaf locality in Nevada where some 42 species of 40-million-year-old plants have been identified from the Upper Eocene Dead Horse Tuff. |
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Fossil enthusiasts looking for a remote and scenic area in which to find an abundance of well-preserved leaves, seeds and twigs might want to try Copper Basin in Nevada. The fossil site lies within a geologic rock formation called the Dead Horse Tuff, which is Late Eocene in age, dated by radiometric means at some 39 to 40 million years old.
The usual admonitions may sound familiar to many regular travelers of the Great Basin, even laughably repetitious perhaps, but it is critical to remember that Copper Basin lies well off the proverbial beaten track. This is what the locals call the southeastern sector of "Owyhee Country," a sparsely populated Great Basin outback, if you will, where immediate medical or mechanical assistance is nonexistent. You may be able to find a ranch house somewhere out there, but don't count on it in a dire emergency. So, in order to assure a safe and enjoyable visit, those planning to visit the fossiliferous exposure of Dead Horse Tuff at Copper Basin must do so only in a reliable four-wheel-drive vehicle--or, at the very least, a rugged pickup truck whose tire tread can be trusted to carry you over lonesome stretches of semimaintained and unimproved dirt roads subject to washboarding, potholing and sudden washouts. You should also expect to encounter a variety of jagged rocks that tend to ruin even the toughest of tire treads: keep your speeds moderate to slow; there is nothing worse than blowing out more than one tire during a backcountry trek.
The story has been told many time over; I hesitate to attempt another rendering of it here, but as I have already suggested the subject, I might as well join the prodigious body of folk who have already related the tale. Bear in mind that nobody has yet written the definitive account of what happened in Charleston in the 1880s. The general idea is that one George Washington Mardis, a Bible-thumping Old Testament preacher who gave stentorian sermons to his favorite burro "Sampson" made more-or-less regular trips from Charleston to a rather distant community for supplies. Prior to one his scheduled journeys, a local Chinese miner gave him $250 in gold to deliver to the county seat in payment of a debt. Mardis obliged--but it was the last favor he would ever do for anyone on this earth. The next day miners from Charleston found his wagon and team of horses abandoned along the road, below town. In the dry, dead brush nearby they also came upon his remains, riddled with bullet holes. Apparently word had spread to the local criminal element (and there was no short supply of that commodity in Charleston) that Mardi was carrying with that extra gold worth 250 spondulix. A few of the miners at the scene of the crime decided to take a look around, playing amateur sleuth, to see what might turn up. When one of them spotted near the body the tracks of a barefooted individual bearing six toes on the left foot, the search for the perpetrator immediately turned to the Chinese quarter in Charleston. The logic went something like this: Nobody, the investigators averred, but a person of Chinese ancestry would possibly go around without shoes in that harsh, unforgiving northern Nevada climate. Thus, a vigilante posse swooped down on Chinatown, yanking slipper after slipper from the left feet of everyone they happened to encounter. Eventually, after running through scores of normal feet, they came upon one lone male who exhibited that distinctive and incriminating extra toe. The case was closed. They gave the six-toed individual two full days to devise any possible alibi; when none was forthcoming, the man was swiftly convicted on circumstantial evidence. The next day a suitable length of rope was procured and fashioned into the hangman's noose. And with most of the population of Charleston looking on--or taking part, as some accounts of the execution suggest--George Washington Mardis' murder case came to an inevitable ending.
Some 42 species of fossil plants have been identified from the Dead Horse Tuff at Copper Basin. The most abundant forms encountered are fragmentary and, occasionally, complete leaves belonging to a species of alder called Alnus jarbidgiana. In decreasing order of abundance, the nine next most-common remains include: an extinct redwood, Sequoia affinis (which is closely related to the modern coast redwood of northwestern California); leaves, from a tanbark oak; seeds, cone scales and twigs from a spruce; twigs from a second type of spruce; leaves from an Oregon grape; samaras and twigs from a fir, Abies cuprovallis; a second species alder, Alnus cuprovalis; and leaves from a sassafras, Sassafras ashleyi.
It may come as no surprise to students of paleobotany that the first scientist to collect at Copper Basin was none other than the late Dr. Daniel I. Axelrod, who for decades was one of the very finest paleobotanists in the world. After learning of the locality through a private collector in Elko, Axelrod and his field assistant James F. Ashby made their first visit to Copper Basin in the spring of 1939. Axelrod said that they made only a small collection of plants on that date, due to the fact that the ground was still way too damp from the thawing snow pack of the previous winter. Subsequent visits in the summers of 1956, '59, and '61 through '63 netted a total of 5,343 specimens from the Upper Eocene Dead Horse Tuff--all of them now housed in the archival paleobotanical collections at the University California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley, California.
It was certainly a different world at Copper Basin some 39 to 40 million years ago--a broad lake basin within which volcanic ash periodically mixed with the fallen debris from deciduous plants and conifers to form a richly fossiliferous horizon in the Dead Horse Tuff. Today, collectors pry apart the hardened tuffaceous muds on a weathered ridge some 7,150 feet high in the glorious isolation of Nevada, finding a wealth of beautifully preserved fossil plants--a direct link with an age when a now extinct variety of coast redwood towered above thickets of alder, and the harshness of modern winters was yet to come.
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For
the most part the Dead Horse Tuff is an unfossiliferous unit
of pyroclastic debris, a crystal vitric tuff ranging in mineral
composition from a biotite rhyolite to a biotite horneblende
latite some 5,200 feet thick. But near the middle of the extensive
accumulation of solidified volcanic ash--the remnants of a series
of devastating explosive eruptions throughout Late Eocene times--minor
interbeds of tuffaceous shales yield a treasure-trove of beautifully
preserved deciduous leaves, conifer and maple samaras (winged
flying seeds) and conifer foliage (primarily twigs, though cones
and cone scales have been reported). The leaves in particular
are typically preserved as bountiful carbonized impressions,
organic tissues compressed through geologic time to shades of
dark brown to black on a pale reddish-brown matrix. And because
they are so spectacularly preserved, ranking as some of the finest
examples of fossil plants in all the state of Nevada, many Dead
Horse Tuff specimens have begun to appear in the inventories
of commercial fossil dealers throughout the Western states. This
is of course illegal activity, since no fossil specimen collected
on Public Lands--and the Copper Basin locality lies amidst such
a Bureau of Land Management-administered region--may be either
sold or bartered; accordingly, commercial collectors must stay
away from Copper Basin, or the entire fossil-bearing area will
most certainly be closed down to all but professional paleobotanists
representing either an accredited university or museum.
While
in the deep backcountry, many a mile from Copper Basin, visitors
will have an opportunity to observe the old site of Charleston,
formerly one of the most isolated and lawless mining towns in
all of Nevada. Nothing remains now to mark the site, save perhaps
a couple of crumbling wooden buildings, but in a broader historical
perspective Charleston has much to offer. Its general history
has been discussed by many Nevada ghost town enthusiasts, including
such notables as Stanley W. Paher and the inimitable Nell Murbarger,
who in her classic work Ghosts Of The Glory Trail gives
a riveting account of one of the last lynchings to take place
in Elko County--it happened in Charleston.
The
best way to find fossils at Copper Basin is to split with great
care the partially silicified reddish-brown to creamy-white ashy
shales of the Upper Eocene Dead Horse Tuff. Remove large chunks
of the shales from the outcrop and, using either the pick or
blunt end of a geology hammer (or even a broad putty knife, though
a selection of large and small chisels would be a better idea
here), forcefully rap the shales along their natural bedding
planes. Usually, they will split with surprising ease to reveal
a rewarding assortment of carbonized plant remains.
Also
present, but rather rarely found, are such varieties as cypress,
hawthorn, plum yew, pine, maple, rhododendron, Prunus sp. (four
species), eastern wahoo, buckeye, larch, willow, tree sparkleberry,
madrone, currant, ocean spray, rose and leadplant.
Axelrod
published his findings in a scientific, paleobotanical monograph.
In it, Axelrod concluded that the fossil flora most closely resembled
a number of modern conifer forests present in the western United
States, among them the coast redwood and spruce-hemlock forest
of northwestern California and the spruce-larch forests of the
northern Cascade and Rocky Mountains. He also saw some obvious
relationships to the spruce-fir and nearby conifer-deciduous
hardwood forests of the eastern United States and to similar
forest-type associations in China and Japan. Based on the environmental
preferences of modern analogs of species identified from the
Dead Horse Tuff, Axelrod suggested that the Copper Basin Flora
was derived from a conifer-hardwood deciduous forest that lived
close to the zone of montane conifers. Axelrod originally estimated
that elevations at the site of deposition were probably in the
neighborhood of some 3,600 feet; today the fossil site lies at
7,150 feet in a region regularly hit with wintertime weather
extremes reminiscent of an Arctic environment. Recently, though,
paleobotanists Howard Schorn and the late Jack A. Wolfe (passed
away in August, 2005), among others, have concluded, through
several avenues of independent scientific research (including
a rigorous, sophisticated leaf character analysis study) that
the entire ancestral Great Basin region likely existed during
Later Eocene times as a broad plateau that stood as high, if
not higher, than those elevations observed today; Schorn and
Wolfe therefore estimate that the Copper Basin Flora accumulated
at elevations roughly the same as those observed there today--in
other words, around 7,200 feet.
Yet,
approximately 40 million years ago the Late Eocene climate could
best be described as cool-temperate,with roughly 50 to 60 inches
of rain per year--and that well distributed throughout the summer.
There was no snow, except on the higher peaks surrounding the
basin of deposition. The average yearly temperature was somewhere
around 51 degrees, with mean temperatures for the warmest and
coldest months of the year at around 58 and 44 degrees, respectively.