Paleontology in Missouri
[2] During the early Paleozoic, Missouri was covered by a warm shallow sea that would come to be home to creatures like Archimedes, brachiopods, shelled cephalopods, conodonts, corals, crinoids, armored fishes, and trilobites.
Missouri remained partially covered by seawater into the early Cenozoic while a great diversity of trees grew on land.
[3] During the Ice Age the northern part of the state was covered in glaciers while the southern half was home to creatures like camels, mammoths, and mastodons.
[8] The Burlington Formation of Mississippian Missouri is one of the most famous sources of crinoid fossils in the United States.
[9] On land, the Pennsylvanian plant life of Missouri included ferns, reeds, rushes, and scale trees.
The state's early Cenozoic flora comprised plants typical of moderate climatic conditions.
Other Pleistocene mammals that once lived in Missouri include armadillos, bison, bears, camels, deer, horses, musk oxen, peccaries, porcupines, probable raccoons, sloths, and tapirs.
[11] A sinkhole near Enon in Montieau County preserved non-mammalian fossils of the age like frog and turtle bones.
[9] A Missouri Osage tradition tells the story of an incursion by a diverse group of monsters into the area.
[12] Other battles in the war between the animals and monsters occurred at the Pomme de Terre and Osage Rivers.
This tale was commemorated by annual offerings performed at a table rock overlooking the Big Bone River.
Lignite has lent some of the local fossils a black color which would give such specimens a burnt appearance.
[17] Later, in 1838, The St. Louis Museum's Albert Koch uncovered fossils east of the Osage River that would later be identified as belonging to the ground sloth Mylodon.
[17] In 1951 more than two hundred bones and teeth were excavated from a swampy area of a farm slightly southwest of Vienna belonging to a man named Andrew Buschmann.
[17] From 1956 to 1957 a variety of mammal fossils were excavated from a fissure in the ground of Ralls County about 4 miles north of the town of Perry.
The bones were the disarticulated remains of bears, deer, mice, and a kind of eastern wood rat not currently found in the area of the fossil discovery.
[17] More recently, in 1989, the Pennsylvanian sea lily, Delocrinus missouriensis, was designated the Missouri state fossil.
This dinosaur occurrence is associated with clay beds in an area of anomalous geology which may be a graben and associated paleokarst which may be associated with the Reelfoot Rift System to the southeast.
