Boeing's CH-47D 89-00176 recovers an Ichthyosaur.

Cutaway Creek, Alaska

Ichthyosaur fossil extraction in the Arctic Circle of Alaska.

Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

by MARMIAN L. GRIMES, Staff Writer

Monday, July 01, 2002 - CUTAWAY CREEK--A small bare rock face surrounded by a tangle of stunted willows.

It appears inconsequential in the vastness of its surroundings. A small creek below winds across the seemingly endless expanse of swirled brown, green, rust and black summits and valleys that are the northern foothills of the Brooks Range.

A second glance at the hillside tells another story.

The linear cracks in the surface are interrupted by the parallel curves of a rib cage long preserved in stone. Another look reveals the curvature of what used to be the spine of an animal entombed in the mud at the bottom of a prehistoric ocean.

Scientists hope this 9-foot slab of rock contains the most complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur, an extinct marine reptile, ever found in the Alaska Arctic.

"Not a lot of these have been found in North America," said Roland Gangloff, earth sciences curator at the University of Alaska Museum, as he stood atop the hill above the site. "We don't have any that are this complete in our part of the Arctic."

A team of scientists, students and volunteers from the university, along with soldiers from Fort Wainwright, spent last week exposing the fossil and getting it ready for transport to the university. Chinook helicopters from Fort Wainwright will return to the site later this month to pick up the fossil.

The skeleton was first discovered in 1950 by a United States Geological Survey crew mapping the area, which is in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, for oil exploration.

"They found it," Gangloff said, "but they didn't really know what to do with it."

At that time, he said, no paleontologists lived in Alaska.

So the fossil sat.

In 1968 it was visited again by a scientist who erected a sign asking people to leave the site intact. Until the university team arrived last Monday, no-one had seen the fossil for more than 30 years.

"They are in better shape than everyone told us they would be," Gangloff said. "I was really surprised at how easy it was to find. I spotted it from the air. It was dead on the GPS."

Detective work

The skull appears to be broken, as do the vertebrae, Gangloff said, but it still appears to be more complete than any fossilized ichthyosaur remains found in Alaska.

Gangloff and his team are still not positive the skeleton is an ichthyosaur. They won't know until after they get it back to the university. After preparing the fossil, the first task will be to identify the animal.

"We really honestly can't tell what this thing means before we prepare it," Gangloff said. "A lot of the details have to literally be worked out of the rock."

Ichthyosaurs were marine reptiles that first appeared during the middle to late Triassic period, about 240 million years ago.

"This is the beginning of the time of dinosaurs," Gangloff said. "This could be right when dinosaurs start to show up."

Ichthyosaurs appeared up to 80 million years before the dinosaurs, he added. They developed from advanced amphibians.

"They are the closest things the reptiles developed to the porpoises and dolphins," he said.

They had much the same torpedo-like shape, with a vertical tail that moved back and forth, as opposed to the up and down motion of a marine mammal's tail. The ichthyosaurs died out in the Cretaceous period, about 66 to 144 million years ago.

But during the time they lived, they were near the top of their marine food chain.

"When they first started here, very large sharks were really the only competition for their food," Gangloff said.

The geology indicates that the entire area where the fossil was found was once the floor of a deep ocean, Gangloff said, near an upwelling of nutrient rich water along the continental shelf. Such upwellings cause a burst of life, from plants to plankton to larger marine animals.

The ichthyosaur, if that's what it is, may have died in the upper waters of the ocean, Gangloff said. It's body would have sunk to the bottom, like whale carcasses do.

Today, it is ensconced in a layer of chert, a dark, quartz-like rock that was once marine mud. The hillside is alternating layers of chert and shale.

The area is rich with fossils and human artifacts.

Everywhere you look in the region, there could be another fossilized skeleton, Gangloff said. "When we take that slab off there could be one the next layer down."

Paleontologist's delight

Last Wednesday, museum paleontologist Kevin May, armed with an awl and some small brushes, was getting the skeleton ready to be cut away from the rock face.

A closer look at the fossil revealed astonishing detail. The grain of the rib bones was clearly visible. Where pieces were broken, the cross section of the bone was apparent, with a dark-gray material in the center that got lighter toward the surface of the bone.

May was enthusiastic about the fossil.

"This rivals the hadrosaur we took out of the Talkeetna Mountains as far as completeness," he said.

The fossil is a side view of the animal, May said, pointing with fingers covered with frayed Band-Aids. The head is to the left, but is either missing or encased deeper in the rock face. The spinal column is gone, likely broken and fallen down the slope.

Despite that, May, like Gangloff, is happy to find the fossil as complete as it is. "It was a great relief that we hadn't done all of this for nothing," he said. "If we get the chance we will come back and screen this whole slope. If we went through the top meter of it you would get a lot of bone."

The specimen is relatively stable now, May said. Earlier he had coated it with cyanoacrylate, which is basically Super Glue. Expanding foam was injected into some of the larger cracks.

"When we started you could have just reached up here and grabbed this and it would have collapsed," May said, grasping top of the skeleton.

   Wednesday afternoon the crews were going to build a plaster and burlap jacket, or cast, for the front side of the fossil. May then planned to use a rock saw to cut through the chert below the fossil and remove the remaining slate layer behind it. Braces on the back side of the specimen will help stabilize it so it doesn't come apart when it is finally cut free.

   "We'll take like eight or nine feet in one shot," May said.

   It will weigh about a half ton, he said. "We will add hundreds of pounds of plaster to it."

   This is where the Army comes in.

The Chinook helicopters are the only helicopters in the state able to lift the fossil.

Gangloff said the budget for the excavation is about $7,000, money he scraped together from overhead on National Science Foundation grants.

"I raided every fund I could for that $7,000," he said. "There is no way we could pay for all the logistical support we have gotten from the Army."

Educational maneuvers

For the soldiers, it has been a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," said Chief Warrant Officer 2 Astraea Bridges, the officer in charge of the Army's portion of the excavation.

"Alaska is a unique opportunity within the military. This is a unique mission," she said. "Pretty much everyone on the team wants to do this."

Still, Bridges said they weren't quite sure what to expect, since the day before they came up, it was snowing at the site.

But the weather cooperated. By mid-week, the sun was blazing, temperatures were high and a perfect wind kept bugs to a minimum.

"The weather and the lack of small, black, flying, biting bugs has really boosted morale," she said.

The previous evening, some caribou, closely followed by a bear, came through the area, Bridges relayed with excitement. "The caribou finally got smart and realized he was about to be dinner. The bear tracking him was pretty fascinating."

The soldiers, like the rest of the volunteers at the site, were put to work at the excavation site.

"There guys are gung-ho about helping us," May said, looking down at the handful of camouflage-clad people ripping strips of burlap for the cast that would encase the fossil for transport.

A few of them were interested enough in paleontology to spend the better part of a day doing nothing but searching for bones in the rocks below the fossil, he said.

It took some time to figure out exactly what to look for, said Staff Sgt. Randall Havens, and how to tell what is rock and what is bone.

"Most of the fragments were about the size of the end of your fingers," he said. "It is striated on the outside and porous on the ends."

Spc. Jerame Johnson added, "you could actually see a shape in the rock."

The experience has been like a mini-course in paleontology, said Spc. Paul Gilbert.

"You don't really know until you get on the site all what it is going to entail," he said. "It has been enjoyable and a really good learning experience."

Audio Files

The following audio files are in .mp3 format and require a suitable player, such as Windows Media Player (Click-N-Go Here):

PBS Radio KUAC, Fairbanks - Interviewing Kevin May [2.5 Mb]

PBS Radio KUAC, Fairbanks - Preserving Icky I [2.5 Mb]

PBS Radio KUAC, Fairbanks - Preserving Icky II [2.5 Mb]

PBS Radio KUAC, Fairbanks - Lizzie May Williams [2.5 Mb]

PBS Radio KUAC, Fairbanks - CW4 Mark S. Morgan [1.2 Mb]

PBS Radio KUAC, Fairbanks - CW4 Mark S. Morgan II [2.2 Mb]

PBS Radio KUAC, Fairbanks - CW2 Astraea Bridges [2.4 Mb]

PBS Radio KUAC, Fairbanks - Cadet Andy Erickson [2.4 Mb]

Related Sites

University of Alaska Fairbanks