Coon Creek Immersion: Visiting the Cretaceous

70 million year old shell and its imprint collected at the Coon Creek Science Center.

Just got back from our immersion trip to collect Cretaceous fossils at the Coon Creek Science Center, and hiking in Natchez Trace State Park.

It was an excellent trip. Despite the cold, Pat Broadbent did her usual, excellent job explaining the geology of Coon Creek and showing us how to collect and preserve some wonderful specimens. Back at the cabins, we looked at some of the microfossils from the Coon Creek sediments (and some other microscopic crystals); similar fossils can tell us a lot about the Earth’s past climate.

Back at the Park, we traced a streamline from the watershed divide to its marshy estuary, and cooked an excellent seafood dinner as we learned about the major organ systems.

Dinner was delicious.

Our trip was not without difficulties, however. The group learned a bit more about self-regulation, governance and the balance of powers, as a consequence of “The Great Brownie Incident,” and the, “P.E. Fiasco.”

We were also fairly well cut off from the “cloud”: no internet, and you could only get cell reception if you were standing in the middle of the road in just the right spot in front of Cabin #3.

But more on these later. I have some sleep to catch up on.


View Coon Creek Immersion in a larger map

Life in Four Domains

The four domains of life, according to Boyer et al. (2010).

This wonderful, impressionistic image shows representatives of the three domains of life and large viruses, the proposed fourth.

This figure represents the living species in the four small pictures according to the current classification of organisms: eukaryotes (represented by yellow cell), bacteria (represented by green cell), Archaea (represented by blue cell) and viruses (represented by magenta colored Mimivirus).

Boyer et al. (2010): Boyer M, Madoui M-A, Gimenez G, La Scola B, Raoult D (2010) Phylogenetic and Phyletic Studies of Informational Genes in Genomes Highlight Existence of a 4th Domain of Life Including Giant Viruses. PLoS ONE 5(12): e15530. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0015530

Carl Zimmer has an excellent piece in Discover Magazine that summarizes the research, and sets out the new tree of life. Particularly important, is the fact that viruses can transfer genes with each other. The other domains tend to mix their genes during reproduction.