1 The mighty Choteau goiter-plagued dino. This small-town museum kick started a huge dino boom in the area in the late 1960's.
2 I'm glad that we got to see nine live grizzlies on the trip.
3 I can't quite put my finger on what these might be.
4 Einiosaurus - a cool triceratops relative.
5 Our next stop was Sun Canyon, home of the Paleozoic (300-400myo) Madison limestone. We were greeted with some awesome lenticular clouds.
6 Julia and Cameron enjoy the view overlooking the Gibson Reservoir.
7 Every mountain in the area is made soley of the Madison Limestone. The thick layer of rock was tilted, broken and thrust over basement rocks during the past 70 million years or so. The limestone, however, was formed in warm shallow seas 300-400 mya perfect for harboring burgeoning life.
8 Garry shows us evidence of all the past life preserved as fossils in the Madison Limestone.
9 Steve admires the thrust belt. Take a look at this place in Google Earth to see the N-S trending crumples of mountain.
10 The Sun River was jamming and was carrying quite a load, as evidenced by the brown color in the river.
11 So what kind of fossils can one find at Sun Canyon? Lots of crinoid stems. The poker chip-like stalks supported a filter-feeding animal that kind of looked like an upside-down feathery starfish.
12 Crinoids were so abundant, their fossils make the majority of rocks in the world.
13 This is a bryozoan fossil... another filter-feeded with a few living relatives to this day.
14 Some excellent lenticular clouds. They form from the turbulence of air passing over mountainous or hilly terrain. If you imagine air rising up and down in a repeated manner similar to roller coaster dips, the clouds form at the apex (top) of the dip as the lifted air cools and condenses briefly. The clear areas on eithe side of the lenticulars are caused by descending, warming air (analagous to the bottom of a roller coaster dip). So... for every up = clouds, for every down= clear skies. The washboard look to these mountains makes for great turbulence to create these kinds of clouds.
15 A horn coral. They kind of looked like a corucopia basket and this view shows what they looked like from the top, or the "opening" of the basket.
16 The irrigation diversion dam was a overcome by the massive runoff.
17 Just down teh road from the diversion dam we read that there may be some ammonite fossils. We looked but only found some nice examples of brachiopods mixed among abundant crinoid stalks.
18 Ah... the low point of the trip. The road out of Sun Canyon was a bit joslting - nothing horrible - but it was enough to cause our coolant hose to pop-off. It turned out that whoever put the hose on before the trip forgot to clamp it on over the nipple. We lost all of the coolant, but luckily had lots of water to help us limp home after placing the hose on correctly.
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