Paleontology of the Bears Ears National Monument: history of exploration and designation of the monument

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1 Geosciences Department, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas, United States
2 Education Department, Colorado Canyons Association, Grand Junction, Colorado, United States
3 Department of Integrative Biology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.3442v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Paleontology, Natural Resource Management
Keywords
Bears Ears National Monument, paleontology, resource management, Bureau of Land Management, fossil resources, Forest Service, history of, national conservation lands
Copyright
© 2017 Uglesich et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Uglesich J, Gay RJ, Stegner MA. 2017. Paleontology of the Bears Ears National Monument: history of exploration and designation of the monument. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3442v1

Abstract

Bears Ears National Monument (BENM) is a new, landscape-scale national monument jointly administered by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service in southeastern Utah as part of the National Conservation Lands system. As initially designated, BENM encompasses 1.3 million acres of land with exceptionally fossiliferous rock units. These units comprise a semi-continuous depositional record from the Pennsylvanian Period through the middle of the Cretaceous Period. Additional Quaternary and Holocene deposits are known from unconsolidated river gravels and cave deposits. The fossil record from BENM provides unique insights into several important paleontological periods of time, including the Pennsylvanian-Permian transition from fully aquatic to more fully terrestrial tetrapods; the rise of the dinosaurs following the Triassic-Jurassic extinction; and the response of ecosystems in dry climates to sudden temperature increases at the end of the last ice age and across the Holocene. While the paleontological resources of BENM are extensive, they have historically been under-studied. Here we summarize prior paleontological work in BENM and review the data used to support paleontological resource protection in the 2016 BENM proclamation.

Author Comment

This will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal as part of a series of BENM review articles.

Supplemental Information

Supplementary data with publications by author, date, topic, and full citation

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DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.3442v1/supp-1