Paleontology in Alaska
Alaska remained submerged into the Paleozoic era and the sea came to be home to creatures including ammonites, brachiopods, and reef-forming corals.
Early humans crossed this bridge and remains of contemporary local wildlife such as woolly mammoths often show signs of having been butchered.
During the ensuing Ordovician and Silurian a chain of volcanic islands occupied what is now the eastern part of the state.
[3] Alaska's Middle Jurassic Callovian deposits are part of a large geologic region spreading down through Canada and even into the Lower 48 states including Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, Utah and New Mexico.
[4] From the mid to late Jurassic, the area now occupied by Snug Harbor was home to a great diversity of marine invertebrates, which left behind a plethora of fossils.
[2] Others include belemnites, the gastropod Amberlya, the pelecypods Lima, Oxytoma, and possibly Astarte and Isocyprina.
Among the finds were algae, Ampelopsis, conifers, elm, Ficus, a great diversity of hepaticae, laurel, magnolia, oaks, Pinus, Platanus, and sequoias.
[8] Pieces of Cretaceous amber have been found on the shore of Nelson Island, which is located in the Bering Sea.
Their remains were preserved in locations such as the Alaska Peninsula, Awik, the Cook Inlet's shoreline, Eagle City, Unga Island.
[6] During periods of low sea level a land bridge connected Alaska and Asia, allowing an exchanged of the continents' wildlife.
These stories are based on fossils of Ice Age proboscideans whose buried remains are sometimes discovered eroding out of the sediment during spring in southeastern Alaska.
This location was regarded as so unusual that some researchers had expressed suspicions that the remains were planted there as a practical joke.
Among the finds were algae, Ampelopsis, conifers, elm, Ficus, a great diversity of hepaticae, laurel, magnolia, oaks, Pinus, Platanus, and sequoias.
[9] In the mid-to-late twentieth century, the University of Michigan sent summer expeditions into Alaska to look for Cenozoic vertebrates, but after three failed attempts they called off the effort.
[11] In 1994, a duck-billed dinosaur was discovered in a quarry being excavated in the middle Turonian Matanuska Formation for road material near the Glenn Highway, about 150 miles northeast of Anchorage.
[17] In 1997, D. W. Norton and a University of Alaska student named Ron Mancil traced the fossils to the top 3 meters of the bluff.
[17] From 1998 to 2002, the Museum of Nature and Science collaborated with the University of Alaska in a typical paleontological excavation of the site, which is now known as the Kikak-Tegoseak Quarry of the Prince Creek Formation.
[18] The excavation uncovered a new dinosaur bone bed predominated by the remains of an undetermined species of Pachyrhinosaurus.
[17] The harsh local climate left the quarry's fossils in a fragmentary state, necessitating that the researchers change their approach to the excavation.
