Where Is Important.

[Rockwood]

I quite often see reminders on here that it is important to include where a fossil was found. I whole heartedly agree that it is very helpful in the identification process, but calling it important sort of implies that it is scientifically important. Am I wrong in believing that the best pure science would be totally blind to where it was found?

[erose]

We are not talking about experimentation we are talking about observation. We look to the fossil record both to understand individual organisms as well as the progression of life over time. Location information is the key to placing the fossil in a particular formation and thus a particular point in time.

Even already well known and described fossils can have a whole new value when found in a new location. This could expand the geographical range or extend the age and increase our understanding of it.

It is also important to understand that location information is different from just putting a formation name on it. Just like fossils the names and understanding of stratigraphic units changes. In some parts of the world where geology is all topsy turvy formations can (and have) get all mixed up and confused.

[Auspex]

With concise location information (including stratigraphic unit), we can piece together the paleoenvironment and learn more about the critter in question, and all the other members of that community. Heck, the whole geologic time sequence was laid out by the fossils contained in the discrete strata!

[Wendell Ricketts]

In a word: yes, that would be wrong from any scientific pov that I can imagine. It's one of the big differences between, say, coin collecting and fossil collecting -- for us, it matters greatly that accurate collecting info be preserved and associated w/our specimens.

[FossilDAWG]

"Am I wrong in believing that the best pure science would be totally blind to where it was found?"

Your question implies that the only "pure science" is putting a name on a specimen. In fact, many (perhaps most) paleontologists are more concerned with using fossils to unravel geological questions than they are with describing new species. I just read a paper that dealt with two very scrappy ammonites from a New Zealand locality. Neither specimen was close to something any of us would put in a display cabinet, yet they were the first identifiable age-diagnostic fossils ever recovered from that formation, and in fact they allowed the rock formation to be dated not just to the Jurassic, but to a specific stage and biostratigraphic zone, and further it allowed the rock formation to be directly correlated with formations in the Andes and in Alaska/Northern British Columbia. Pretty good "pure science"in my opinion. Now imagine the value of those two scrappy ammonite fragments without locality data. Absolutely nothing.

In fact, whenever possible the locality data should include the specific layer the fossil came from. This is because in some cases (such as many ammonites) individual species are confined to narrow zones, and more than one ammonite zone might be present in a single outcrop. If specimens from multiple zones are mixed, information is lost. However, the nature of the sites we sometimes have available may limit our ability to be precise about the source of our fossils. In the US Southeast and Atlantic coastal plain, often people screen gravel in creeks and rivers, and recover fossils that may have eroded from several different layers. Even in these cases, people should be as specific as they can reasonably be when recording locality info.

As Auspex and Erose mentioned as well, if you want to reconstruct the paleoenvironment your fossil lived in, you need to know about all the associated species, and to do that you need to keep track of the locality (and ideally specific layer) as you can never hope to collect the entire fauna in one visit.

One more point, although in principle you should be able to ID a specimen independently of knowing the locality, sometimes knowing the age and rock formation can make the process much simpler. For example there is the problem of homeomorphs: sometimes quite different species may have very similar exterior appearances. This is not uncommon with brachiopods, for example. The homeomorphs can be distinguished by internal features, but to see those you may have to grind serial sections through the specimen, which is a lot of work and ultimately largely destroys the specimen. On the other hand, homeomorphic species pairs arise by chance and by convergent evolution, so the species involved tend to be widely separated in time. In this case if you know the locality you know the age, so you can can ID the species without having to section the specimen to see internal features.

As others have mentioned as well, without locality data you could never define the temporal, stratigraphic, and geographic range of a species. All these data are perfectly good "pure science".

There's more, but this will do for a start.

Don

Edited June 10, 2012 by FossilDAWG

[Kehbe]

two very scrappy ammonites Neither specimen was close to something any of us would put in a display cabinet, yet they were the first identifiable age-diagnostic fossils ever recovered from that formation, and in fact they allowed the rock formation to be dated not just to the Jurassic, but to a specific stage and biostratigraphic zone, and further it allowed the rock formation to be directly correlated with formations in the Andes and in Alaska/Northern British Columbia.

Geeze FossilDawg, Thanks alot for telling me this....You see, I already bring home enough "scrappy" specimens and I must admit, I do that because knowing as little as I know and that isn't very much I have this unhealthy fear of 'leaving something behind that might be important to science!" which translates into waay more 'scrappy' fossils piling up on the kitchen table and on the shelves in my garage and in the back of my truck and on the floorboard of my truck and in the passenger seat of my truck and right here in front of my computer on the desk and, and, and......... well, you get the picture!

But on a more serious note, thanks all of you for the good info and reasoning for proper and accurate location information. It just makes good sense. Unfortunatly I struggle with ID'ing strata so much of the time and I know you guys, (missourian) have got to get tired of telling me over and over again what strata I'm in. Alas, I really doubt that I will make any earth shattering discoveries but amatuers do exactly that often enough that I try to keep location info as accurate as I am able, with all of you guys help of course! I have even started adding GPS coordinates to my tags if for no other reason than to find my way back to that site if I want to! I-Phone apps for GPS are plentiful and are great for doing this. Good info in this thread, thanks for posting it up Rockwood!

[Rockwood]

I'm afraid I wasn't clear about what I was calling science. I was referring specifically to the method of identifying the piece. My point was that where it was found should not be considered if you want the ID to be useful. Calling it something because that is what is supposed to be found there will get you no where. I agree with you all.

Good science indeed.

[FossilDAWG]

Geeze FossilDawg, Thanks alot for telling me this....You see, I already bring home enough "scrappy" specimens and I must admit, I do that because knowing as little as I know and that isn't very much I have this unhealthy fear of 'leaving something behind that might be important to science!" which translates into waay more 'scrappy' fossils piling up on the kitchen table and on the shelves in my garage and in the back of my truck and on the floorboard of my truck and in the passenger seat of my truck and right here in front of my computer on the desk and, and, and......... well, you get the picture!

I think that's an all-to-common problem.

In the example I gave, to be fair, the fossils came from a formation considered to be virtually unfossiliferous; the only fossils known were a few species of pelecypods that don't occur anywhere else, so they aren't useful for correlation. If you ever find something unusual in such a circumstance, it's a good idea to bring the find to the attention of a geologist at a local university or geological survey. For the rest, hopefully in time you'll learn to distinguish scrappy bits of common and sometimes better preserved species from things that are rare or novel. With experience the amount of "leaverite" that makes it to your house should decline (though the family may not notice or appreciate the difference).

Don

[FossilDAWG]

I'm afraid I wasn't clear about what I was calling science. I was referring specifically to the method of identifying the piece. My point was that where it was found should not be considered if you want the ID to be useful. Calling it something because that is what is supposed to be found there will get you no where. I agree with you all.

Good science indeed.

In principle that's certainly true. In the past, it was fairly common for new names to be generated just because a specimen came from a different country or rock formation. Sometimes this was due to lack of access to published literature (people publishing in limited circulation local journals, or to language barriers), but often it was due to the desire to grab any excuse to name new species. At the height of the "bone wars" (Marsh vs Cope) virtually every scrap of bone, no matter how non-diagnostic, was given a new name if it came from a new locality. Some early trilobite workers (cough cough Resser cough cough) would not only apply new names based on locality, and actually say in some cases "this looks just like such-and-such a species but since it's from a different formation it deserves a new name". Much work has been necessary to try to clean up the confusion. For the collector who really wishes to ID their specimens, matching to such species lists may be quite confusing.

However, especially for amateur collectors, things are a bit more nuanced. Ignoring locality (and so age, geography, habitat [shale = muddy sediment vs carbonate = clear warm shallow conditions]) puts one in the position of having to know every species that has ever been described to arrive at a confident ID. For example, there are a couple of dozen coral species known from the Hamilton Group (Middle Devonian of Ontario/New York/Pennsylvania), out of thousands of genera and tens of thousands of species worldwide. If I am given a specimen to ID with no locality data at all, then I will have to check that specimen against every described Order, Family, Genus, and species,a process that will require making thin sections (both longitudinal and cross) of the juvenile, mature, and possibly "old age" parts of the specimen. The preservation had better be very good for all those features to be visible. In some cases the microstructure of the corallite walls (fibrous vs laminar, spacing and direction of the fibers), and the presence/absence of tiny pores connecting the corallites, are critical in defining the genus. This is the kind of thing that can only really be done by a coral specialist who has access to facilities for making thin sections, and an excellent reference library. That is why there aren't any paleontologists today who will agree to give their professional opinion on all the fossils some field geologist brings in; the field geologist will have to recruit specialists to ID each group of fossils (corals vs brachiopods vs snails vs trilobites and so on) before they can produce a definitive report on their field mapping.

So, back to our Hamilton Group coral: as an amateur I can reasonably expect to be able to ID my specimen by matching it to a list of species the coral expert has, after long study, determined are present in the Hamilton Group. Mostly we'll be looking at different genera, where the differences are larger and often don't need a thin section. Where there are multiple species within a genus the difference may also be a small number of characters that can be observed directly in well preserved specimens, though sometimes not (but then your label will only indicate a couple of possibilities, not thousands).

I could write the same things about most other fossil groups.

In general I think there is a developmental progression in how people approach the ID problem:

Level 1: match to pictures from books (e.g. Audubon field guides) or the web. Very low confidence identifications, usually based on irrelevant or superficial resemblances.

Level 2: match to pictures from more focused publications, such as "Fossil Sharks of Texas", or to well curated private or museum collections. IDs may be more confident, if the groups are not very diverse, the species are fairly distinct, and the coverage in the reference book/collection is quite complete. In other cases (eg many brachiopods, corals) the coverage in books for hobby collectors is poor and out of date, and the IDs will often be the same.

Level 3: starting from formation or locality-specific publications, match based on both photos and written descriptions of the species, paying attention to diagnostic characters. These can be very high confidence IDs. However, a lot of specialized knowledge will be necessary to understand the written descriptions and see if the specimen at hand fits. At this level, one starts get a real appreciation for the complexities of individual variation (biological and preservational) vs species boundaries.

Level 4: deep familiarity with a particular group of organisms, so Families, Genera, and even species can be recognized without knowing specific locality data. This is a professional level of knowledge, and usually requires specialization on a narrow taxonomic range. The advantage is that you can critically evaluate published research, decide for yourself if species X is really different than species Y, and recognize undescribed taxa when you encounter them.

Lots of good amateur collectors reach level 3, and a surprising large number can reach a professional level of knowledge in specialized areas, especially now that the internet makes so much professional literature available.

Don

Edited June 10, 2012 by FossilDAWG

[Auspex]

...Sometimes this was due to lack of access to published literature (people publishing in limited circulation local journals, or to language barriers)...

The facility of information exchange with the advent of the internet has been a game-changer (to which we are all still adapting)!

Case-in-point: In 1978, Glen Penfield published the discovery of a massive meteorite crater found during his work for Petrolleos Mexicanos, noting its probable age as right at the K-T boundary. Since it was published (and orally presented in 1981) for oil company geologists, it escaped the notice of those working on Alvarez' impact theory (the only problem for which was the lack of a large crater from the right time period). It was more than 10 years before those dots were connected! Cross-discipline communication has advanced, due to the power of the internet, to the point where it is hard to imagine the recurrence of an oversight of this magnitude.

[erose]

FossilDAWG,

I like your description of the process. Those crazy splitters and lumpers sometimes mucked things up pretty good. After decades of doing this I hope to say I am pretty much in level 3 territory at least for some of the areas/faunas I collect. But I am only able to do that after years of building my own reference library. And with my library somewhere between 450-500 books, papers and reports it still isn't always enough.

I do see Rockwood's point about how it might be better to be purely objective when describing an organism than suffering the subjectivity of prior knowledge. Every so often we learn of some new DNA study that shatters previously held concepts of the relationships between organisms. But that will be really hard to accomplish for the fossil record.

Oh and one thing to clarify about my original reply: I did not intend to imply that recording a formation name is not important. If you know it then certainly do so and if you know the member or group names as well that is good. But that alone, without the actual location notes can be a problem later. Anyone who has gotten up to level 3 knows how one needs a correlation chart comparing the old formation names with the new ones so that the old descriptions and reports can be sorted out.

Edited June 10, 2012 by erose

[Wrangellian]

The internet is certainly an advance for science and for amateurs but there is still a ways to go when people like myself still have so much trouble accessing papers/etc on their local fossils to try and narrow down some IDs or figure out whether or not they have been described from elsewhere yet. So far it appears the majority of what I need to see is still only to be found in publications or pay sites that I dont have access to. Maybe with time....

[the tatter]

Aw, I thought 'important' was lost

[Auspex]

Aw, I thought 'important' was lost

No, he's on second...

[xonenine]

Aw, I thought 'important' was lost

i thought sure I could find it on Google Maps, it isn't there...

[Rockwood]

Thank you FossilDAWG and all. This is a good grounding in practicality. I hope you all remember that small changes in the terms we use, useful vs important for example, can influence the way we think in a slight but constant way and it's always good to keep the goal of clean science in mind. History is full of mistakes that were based on mistakes.