The search for microfossils is sometimes a very unrewarding task. I have collected, washed, and scoured through, quite literally, tons of rock looking for a single mammal tooth. But however tedious and arduous the task of looking for microfossils is, the rewards greatly outweigh the time spent looking. Microfossils are, as you may have guessed, very small fossils. These small fossils can be anything from microscopic animals that lived in water environments to very small bone fragments to very, very small teeth and everything in between. In this case I am referring to very small mammal teeth. These teeth are so small they can be glued on the head of a pin.

The recovery process of these teeth begins with collecting rock. However, paleontologists don’t just randomly stick a shovel in the ground and hope to hit pay dirt. Sites used to study microfossils are chosen very carefully. These sites, called microsites, are usually places where other fossils are already weathering out at the surface. Small fossils, easily visible with the naked eye, are usually common, and the fossils tend to be concentrated within a definable, thin horizon.

This is an example of a thin fossiliferous horizon. The black specks in the overturned chunk are fish scales.

This horizon is then collected by hand or by shovel and brought back to the laboratory. That collected rock is then subjected to a process called screen washing. The collected dirt is washed through one or sometimes two sets of screen, the smallest screen usually smaller than the screen on your windows and doors at home. What remains on the screens after washing is dried and then systematically “picked”- under a microscope where microfossils are collected from the remaining dirt and rock.

The most common fossils that come out of this concentrate are usually fish bones and teeth. Rarely though, a mammal tooth will be found. It is these rare mammal teeth that can potentially tell us the most about one particular site. From being able to potentially restrict the age of the site to within a few million years or to give us greater detail about the paleoenvironment, fossil mammals play an important role in paleontology.

One of the cool things about my job is I get to put real objects in people’s hands. When objects are donated to a museum they generally go through a basic process. A committee considers a number of things including: What is known about the history of this item? Do we know who created it or who used it? How does this relate to what we already have in our collections? Do we need another one? Is there a clear connection to North Dakota history? Is there a clear chain of legal ownership established? This chain of ownership is known as provenance in the museum world. If we can’t establish provenance, we usually can’t accept an object as a donation.

So what happens to items that are not accepted in the official museum collection? There are a number of things a donor might decide to do at this point—keep the item, sell it, throw it away. We usually recommend other museums that might be interested in particular items, and sometimes we ask to add the objects to our Education Collection. While an official museum collection is handled in a very purposeful manner, objects in an education collection are eventually used up. Objects that are part of the official museum proper are not touched unless they need to be, such as an inventory or being placed in an exhibit. The goal is to preserve these objects forever. An education collection is different in that while we do try to handle things carefully, we know that it is unlikely these items will be preserved forever. The objects very well could be used up to the point they are broken and eventually thrown away. Why would we allow this to happen? An education collection gives us objects we can put into people’s hands. Visitors can examine quilt squares to see the difference between machine and hand stitching. They can put on a pair of wire rim eyeglasses. They can pick up the scent of cloves that can still be detected in a metal spice container. They can write on a slate board and feel the fur on a beaver pelt. There is nothing more fun than explaining to a group of 4^th graders that the coprolite they are holding is real, fossilized, dinosaur poo.

One way of getting all these educational objects into people’s hands is to ship them out to every corner of the state in big boxes we call SEND trunks. The Suitcase Exhibits of North Dakota (or SEND) program is geared to the 4^th grade classroom. However, we have all kinds of other organizations that use SEND trunks including other museums, nursing homes, Boy Scouts, and homeschool groups. We retire and add new topics periodically, with about 18 to 20 topics available most of the time. If your school or organization is interested in getting your hands on history, you can order a trunk by submitting the form available at this link: http://history.nd.gov/pdf/SENDApplForm2013.pdf or e-mailing me at dlstuckle@nd.gov.

Gun Barrel fashioned into a scraper to clean the flesh off of animal hides before tanning. From the Fur Trade SEND Trunk.