On the first floor of the Earth and Physical Sciences Building, tucked away amongst the classrooms and labs, is a space that contains remnants of Earth’s ancient past. Large cabinets line the sides of the hall-like room, the drawers of which are labeled with different geological periods. The names are reminiscent of the fantastical: Cambrian, Silurian, Ordovician, Devonian and so on.
“Each drawer is a surprise,” said David Gold, an associate professor of earth and planetary sciences and the manager of the UC Davis Paleontology Collection.
The UC Davis Paleontology Collection contains thousands of specimens, the oldest of which are nearly 2 billion years old. Primarily a teaching collection, it’s used for undergraduate courses, including Geobiology (GEL 053) and Paleobiology Lab (GEL 107L). But these specimens also make public appearances during UC Davis outreach events like Biodiversity Museum Day and Picnic Day.
Gold’s goal as manager of the fossil collection is to one day create permanent installations to display standout specimens. Recently, he gave us a tour of the collection and highlighted five of his favorite kinds of specimens. Check out his picks below!
Ammonites
Denizens of the Jurassic and Cretaceous oceans, ammonites looked like modern day squids (they were cephalopods, after all) but with coiled shells. Their shell sizes varied, with some only growing as big as a human fingernail while others pushed closer to six feet in diameter. Within an ammonites’ shell are various chambers, which were used to regulate buoyancy.
“These chambers have a tendency, as they fossilize, to fill with different minerals,” said Gold, noting that they become time capsules of the ancient environment that was inhabited by the specimen.
Trilobites
Resembling the fossil Pokémon Kabuto, trilobites were marine arthropods that thrived during the Paleozoic Era, roughly 251 to 521 million years ago. Their modern-day relatives include crabs and insects. Much like ammonites, trilobites came in all shapes and sizes. Some could coil up like pill bugs while others possessed bodies dappled with spikes.
“Trilobites are a group that actually precedes the dinosaurs,” Gold said. “They went extinct right before the age of dinosaurs began.”
Dire wolf mandible
When you hear the words “dire wolf,” your mind might conjure hulking creatures ripped straight from Game of Thrones. In actuality, dire wolves, which roamed the Americas from 125,000 to 9,500 years ago, were larger than modern-day gray wolves but nowhere near the colossal size of their cinematic counterparts.
“Their jaws were specialized to produce a stronger bite than any living wolf,” said Gold, pointing out a broken canine tooth in the collection’s specimen.
Ecologists have noted for a while that in places where there were many predators competing for prey, there tended to be a higher rate of tooth breakage, which is probably due to them trying to eat as much as possible before being chased away by a bigger predator.
“The predators from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, where this jaw was recovered, tend to have a lot of broken teeth,” Gold said. “This suggests competition was high for prey when the dire wolf was alive.”
Brachiopods
Some specimens in the UC Davis Paleontology Collection belong to creatures that still thrive today. Brachiopods are a good example of this. Superficially resembling clams, though they are a different phylum than mollusks, brachiopods have a nearly 550-million-year history on the planet Earth.
“Brachiopods are really rare today, but in the past, they were extremely successful. There are more than 10,000 described species, and they are critical for distinguishing rocks of different ages from each other."
Leaves
The UC Davis Paleontology Collection doesn’t just contain the remains of animals past. It also contains specimens from plants past. Around 443 million years ago, during the Silurian period, land plants started becoming more common. Vascular plants, which have specialized systems for fluid transport like the xylem, were gaining dominance.
“This little fossil is an excellent example of carbonization,” Gold said. “That’s a process where a fossil experiences so much heat and pressure deep in the earth that all of the organic matter was gassed off, leaving only a film of carbon behind. When this happens, you can sometimes get detailed impressions of soft tissues, and not just the hard shells and bones that make up most of the fossil record.”
Learn more about the UC Davis Paleontology Collection.
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