UNLV

This was the first full day of my meeting (the GSA Cordilleran/Rockies sections joint meeting), and while most of the science was interesting, I wanted to say first that the location is cool. The University of Nevada Las Vegas is a bright campus of clean new buildings with almost no grass and no ivy. It's xeriscaped from end to end, and if you love the American desert you will feel at home here, even in this fantasyland city.

Not just a fine campus, UNLV is the home of an excellent geoscience department with a unique two-part field camp. They foster undergraduate research and do research all around the West. They're friendly and they have a million rocks.

The most fun I had in the talks was learning more about the Rancholabrean, the most recent North American Land Mammal Age. This is a regional geologic time unit based on the appearance of Bison species—actually it's a biochron; so far we don't have a good idea of what its actual dates are. Two talks this afternoon took up that topic. The first showed that the Bison material in the Southwest is (1) very young or (2) not Bison but misidentified fossils of other species, most often camels. So we have little notion of how far back the Rancholabrean goes. The best locality by far is in the Upper Las Vegas Wash. The second talk described this area, on the outskirts of this fast-sprawling city, where a rich fossil record extends from the present back to at least 200,000 years. Efforts are being made with teh Bureau of Land Management to make it a Conservation Transfer Area. And guess what, of course there's a blog with more: Rebecca Hunt's Dinochick. I'm adding that to my bloggers list right now.