PaleoBios

Participants should plan to arrive in Riverside by June 18. We will depart from the University of California, Riverside campus the morning of June 19. We will drive 5 hours to the White-Inyo Mountains. We will spend the remainder of June 19 and most of June 20 visiting the upper Ediacaran through lower Cambrian succession of this area, including a rich assemblage of trace fossils and some of the earliest Laurentian biomineralized fossils. We will drive to Beatty, NV the evening of June 20. On the morning of June 21, we will visit upper Ediacaran strata and an Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary section of the Reed Dolomite and Deep Spring Formation at Mount Dunfee and see Ediacaran microbialites, tubular body fossils and some of the oldest complex trace fossils. We will spend midday at the nearby ghost town of Gold Point, NV, and have an opportunity to see the spectacular early Cambrian archaeocyathan reefs of the Poleta Formation at Stewart’s Mill in the afternoon. We will depart Beatty the morning of June 22 and return to Riverside by way of Death Valley, where we will make brief stops to discuss the stratigraphy of the Death Valley region, Neogene lake deposits near Shoshone and Cryogenian diamictites and the Marinoan cap carbonate exposed in the Saddle Peak Hills and at Sperry Wash. We will be staying in motels in Big Pine, CA (June 19) and Beatty, NV (June 20–21); participant lodging for these days will be covered by field trip fees. Lunches on all four days (June 19–22) and breakfast on the third day of the trip (June 21) will be provided; participants will be responsible for all other meals. We will return to Riverside in the late afternoon on June 22, in time for participants to check in to conference lodging. See Figure 1 for a map of field trip destinations.