It has been a million years in the making.
A new digital map called the “Bighorn Basin WY Land Mammal Age Map” allows users to track dinosaurs, prehistoric animals and ancient plants that once thrived in and ruled the Bighorn Basin in central Wyoming.
Originally built to help scientists in the field, the map is also a great tool for anyone curious about Wyoming’s earliest inhabitants.
Users can use the free map hosted on the Avenza Maps app to drop a pin in their current location in the basin and learn about the different periods of time right underneath them.The app is available for iPhone and Android.
“It is a map of animal ages,” geologist Bob Raynolds told Cowboy State Daily. “It's a digital geological map that shows what we call the North American land mammal ages.”
The Map
The project was coordinated by Raynolds, who worked with the experts in the field to pinpoint where each prehistoric animal that has been found in the Bighorn Basin would have lived, and which plants grew where, millions of years ago.
Phil Gingerich, Professor Emeritus of Geology, Biology and Anthropology at the University of Michigan, was able to show the areas where ancient mammals once lived in the basin. Scott Wing, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian, provided the locations of the prehistoric plants. Geologic Data Systems, a company based in Littleton, Colorado, then created the GPS coordinates using the information provided by the scientists.
“It's a map of the Bighorn Basin showing the ages of the rock,” Raynolds said. “It is geared towards paleontologists and scientists, but the general public will appreciate seeing what fossils are in the Bighorn Basin and where.”
While many visitors may have seen the fossil record in museums and collections, the goal of this new interactive map is to get people who are outdoors and hiking around the basin to realize where these creatures once lived.
When users of the map walk around in the Bighorn Basin with their smart phone or tablet, they will see a little dot showing what land mammal age they are in. This then corresponds to what kind of animals lived in that geological time that they are walking in.
“It's a wonderful new capacity,” Raynolds said. “We haven't had this before, and we're going to be experimenting with it this summer when the paleontologists come to work in the Bighorn Basin.”
Helping Scientists In The Field
These scientists and students come from various colleges and universities and are spread over a large swath of land in the Bighorn Basin ranging from such places as Powell to Greybull to Thermopolis.
“We were floundering because we didn't have the modern technology,” Raynolds said. “It was hard for everybody to talk to everybody else and have a common view because they worked in different areas.”
They will now have a regional basin wide map of the entire Bighorn Basin area that Raynolds has been working on for years to make as accurate as possible. He anticipates that after this summer, he will be updating the map with input from the scientists who will use it in the field and share their data with him.
The map is color coded to show which time zone you may be standing in and the pin moves with you as you move from various areas where different animals and plants once were. The color-coded ages on the map represent divisions of Paleocene (66 to 55.5 million years ago) and a portion of Eocene time (55.5 to about 49 million years ago).
Raynolds said that this function will enable the map to be a tool for people to expand their horizons beyond their traditional place of work.
He gave the example that scientists could be spending their entire career working in an area that is coded orange on the map for the Wasatch Zone 1 - 2. When they study the map, they could realize that there is another area miles away with the same orange code and could compare the data in this new region to see if the animals are the same.
“The maps are going to show them that it's a big basin and that there's lots of other places in the basin where the same age material is at the surface,” Raynolds said. “I anticipate that it will open up some horizons for some of the people who work in the basin.”
Raynolds is looking forward to this summer and hopeful that people from all walks of life will download the map to experience the Bighorn Basin of millions of years ago.
After all, it is a chance to track dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures in Wyoming.
Contact Andrew Rossi at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.
