Episode 110 - Mazon Creek Fossil Beds

The Common Descent Podcast

Common Descent

Science, Education, Earth Sciences, Natural Sciences, Science:natural Sciences

4.8 • 764 Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2021

⏱️ 89 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Go searching in the right spots in Illinois and you’re liable to find a hard chunk of ironstone with a gorgeous fossil inside. The Mazon Creek Fossil Beds represent some of the best Carboniferous fossils in the world, yielding exceptionally preserved plants and animals from a tropical river delta over 300 million years old. This episode, we discuss the history, the geology, and some of the most famously bizarre creatures of Mazon Creek. In the news: a “winged” shark, digging ankylosaurs, the oldest cephalopods, and a fly full of pollen. Time markers: Intro & Announcements: 00:00:00News: 00:04:30Main discussion, Part 1: 00:33:30Main discussion, Part 2: 00:56:00Patron question: 01:22:00 Check out our blog for bonus info and pictures:http://commondescentpodcast.wordpress.com/ Find merch at the Common Descent Store! http://zazzle.com/common_descent Follow and Support us on: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/commondescentpodcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/CommonDescentPCFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/commondescentpodcastInstagram: @commondescentpodcast YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCePRXHEnZmTGum2r1l2mduwPodBean: https://commondescentpodcast.podbean.com/ iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-common-descent-podcast/id1207586509?mt=2 The Intro and Outro music is “On the Origin of Species” by Protodome. More music like this at http://ocremix.org. Musical Interludes are "Professor Umlaut" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Common Descent Podcast.
0:18.8	Hello, Will. Hello, David. Hello, listeners, and welcome to episode 110 of Common Descent
0:25.4	podcast. Today, we are once again turning our focus to a fossil deposit of note. This time,
0:34.5	the Maison Creek fossil beds of Illinois, here in the United States, possibly,
0:40.3	certainly among the most famous carboniferous fossil deposits in the world.
0:45.8	Cool.
0:46.9	Absolutely full of very cool fossils.
0:48.7	Back during the early days of modern-ish-looking ecosystems, the Mazon Creek fossil beds are exciting,
0:57.0	not only because they preserve a lot of cool stuff, but if we can be a little bit selfish
1:02.6	and some home country pride, this is a real cool fossil site, and it's right here in our
1:08.9	country of the United States. I'm so excited to learn about it
1:12.3	because I've heard this name just all around, but I don't actually know much about this site.
1:17.8	So I'm eager to learn. Yeah, it's quite famous and it's almost difficult to narrow down how to talk
1:26.2	about it because there's so much, as we'll get into.
1:29.4	So we're going to talk about what the site is, what makes it unique. We'll talk about the
1:33.4	human history and the geologic history, and then we'll talk a bunch about the fossils that are
1:38.7	found there. And of course, for anyone out there who has heard of Maison Creek, odds are you've
1:44.0	heard of it
1:44.6	for the specific creature we will spend some time talking about at the end, the Tully Monster.
1:50.8	Yeah.
1:51.7	State fossil of Illinois and just the super bizarre, utterly weird animal.
1:56.8	Good name, too.
	...

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