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Fossils turn up in unexpected places around Washington, DC, from a flower bed at Frederick Douglass's last home to a Metro subway excavation. A National Park Service curator's survey in a park paleontology newsletter lists what National Capital Parks-East (NACE), established in 1965, holds. About half of its parks are known to have fossil resources and fossils in the museum collection, most of them picked up from the surface by Resource Management staff, rangers, contract workers or visitors. Several paleontological surveys have been done with staff and interns from the Park Service's Geological Resources Division, the latest in the summer of 2017.
Skolithos linearis, a tube burrow, in a collected stone. NPS photo.
Park by park
| Park | What is in the collection |
|---|---|
| Anacostia Park | One fossil: a quartzite cobble with Skolithos linearis tube burrows made by worms, from the early Cambrian, about 530 million years old. It probably traveled from western Maryland down the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. |
| Fort Circle Parks | A sandstone piece with the impression of a pelecypod shell, found on top of Fort Dupont's earthwork. It cannot yet be tied to a formation. |
| Fort Washington Park | Mostly from the Aquia Formation, about 55 million years old: oysters, clam molds and marine snail molds, plus mako and sand shark teeth, cownose ray tooth plates, a sea turtle scute and an upper leg bone of an unidentified crocodile. All the invertebrates were affected by the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum extinction event. |
| Frederick Douglass National Historic Site | A quartzite piece with a Skolithos burrow found on the house steps, probably carried by an ancestral Potomac River. Douglass himself collected shells, plants, rocks and coral; at least two coral specimens that may be fossils are being researched, and a book on fossil oysters inscribed to him is in the collection. |
| Greenbelt Park | A rare cycadeoid (Cycadeoidea marylandica) found in 1970 during a biological survey. A 2014 survey after a visitor reported plant fossils found none, but turned up another Skolithos burrow. |
| Oxon Cove Park | Two Skolithos trace fossils, early Cambrian. A survey in May 2017 found no fossils in the upland deposits and recommended monitoring the ravines. |
| Piscataway Park | Marine invertebrates from the Aquia Formation (oysters, snails, clam molds) and cownose ray plates, all found by staff doing biological surveys. No paleontological survey has been done yet. |
| Suitland Parkway | Fossils from the Calvert Formation found in 1997 during construction of the Green Line subway (below). |
Part of a trunk of the cycadeoid Cycadeoidea marylandica. NPS photo.
The whale under Suitland Parkway
In 1997 workers building the Green Line Metro uncovered parts of a baleen whale's jaw and skull, a rib from a dugong, two shark teeth and three land-animal bones, including a peccary rib. The Smithsonian first received the fossils but returned them to the Park Service once it was found that they belonged to the NPS when they were discovered. The whale skull was pieced together at the Smithsonian in 2004. Sand taken from it was sent to a USGS scientist, who dated the specimen to the early to middle Miocene, about 16 million years old, within the Plum Point member of the Calvert Formation.
A Smithsonian paleontologist called the material significant because marine mammal fossils are rarely found in the Calvert Formation outside the Calvert Cliffs area, and a museum curator said it could be a rarer specimen or even a new species of baleen whale. A geologist at the College of Charleston judged from photos that the skull resembles Diorocetus and Parietobalaena; more research is needed.
Part of a lower jaw of a baleen whale, found by workers building the Green Line Metro. NPS photo.
The parkway also has late Paleocene sediments of the Aquia Formation along Henson Creek, where subway work turned up only an oyster valve. A Skolithos burrow was collected in a spring 2016 survey made before a sewer pipe went in.
Sources
- National Park Service, "The Paleontological Resources of National Capital Parks East," by Mike Antonioni, Park Curator, in Park Paleontology News, spring 2018 issue (https://www.nps.gov/articles/park-paleo-spring-2018-antonioni-nace-b.htm); rewritten in hubnx's own words. The source gives both about 15 and 16 as the number of parks, so the count is left out.
In these publicationsNational Capital Parks-East
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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