Donate

Carter County - Model Geologic Time

Background Info / Historical Story

“About the time that Montana became a state, a new branch of science dealing with fossils was creating interest among a few large museums and universities, and small groups of scientists were taking to the field to collect evidence of life of the past. Geologists were finding that they could use fossils to help identify and correlate geologic strata and to help determine their geologic histories. Biologists were using them to trace the evolutionary histories of living things. The public at large was intrigued with the immensity of geologic time and with the direct evidence of the size and variety of animals that once lived on this earth. So began the organized search for fossils. Chicago’s Field Museum had a party under Professor Elmer S. Riggs in southeastern Montana in 1904 where they collected a skull of the three horned dinosaur Triceratops, about five miles west of Chalk Buttes in the Powder River drainage. The skull was prepared and placed on exhibit where it has stimulated the imagination of millions of museum visitors during the past 70 years. Those early years of fossil exploration in what was open cow country also stimulated the imagination of some of the range riders who had become acquainted with the visiting paleontologists to discuss the significance of fossils and to learn fossil collecting techniques. In the years that followed, many paleontologists visited Carter County and the surrounding region, and the local amateurs got together to ponder the mysteries of their natural environment. A central portion of Carter County is composed of fine clay and shale, locally called “gumbo”, deposited about 100 million years ago on the bottom of the Pierre Sea which covered much of eastern Montana. Deposited with these fine sediments were the remains of countless sea animals whose fossil shells are now exposed at the surface as the soft shale erodes away. Gastropods, pelecypods and cephalopods are the major groups of mollusks preserved, represented by snails, clams and ammonites of many kinds. One straight shelled cephalopod, baculites, is an especially abundant genus, while specimens of the phylum Brachiopoda are rare. Prof. Riggs collected some remains of a Cretaceous lobster on the Little Missouri River near Albion in 1904. Marshall E. Lambert, of the Carter County Museum, found a few more lobster fragments in 1963 when he relocated the site at the request of the Field Museum. Also rare are fossils of marine vertebrate animals such as fish and reptiles, but fish scales, shark teeth and traces of Mosasaur, a fish eating reptile, have been collected.”- Shifting Scenes Volume 2, Marshall E. Lambert 1976

Collections Spotlight

Photos, Maps, etc

Links to other helpful sources: