Uncovering Fossils in the Under-explored Bear Gulch Limestone

400 million years ago, long before dinosaurs ruled the earth, a hidden tropical sea covered what is now the rugged mountains of Montana. Beneath these cliffs lies one of the most mysterious fossil sites in North America. The Bear Gulch Limestone. A place where ancient sharks, strange fish, and delicate soft-bodied creatures were frozen in time. In this episode, the hunt grows more dangerous as the terrain crumbles beneath our feet. New discoveries emerge from the stone, and we uncover clues from a lost world few have ever seen. This is Chasing History. Hey everybody, my name is Chase Pipes, and you're watching Chasing History, brought to you by the Smoky Mountain Relic Room, and we are out in the wilds of Montana on the edge of a cliff looking for fossils. Why are we looking for fossils on the edge of a cliff, Matthew? Well, what better place would you look for fossils, I mean? We're with our buddy Matthew Harrell. Matthew, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, no worries, man, anytime. Thanks for having us out, man. So, what we're going to talk about is we're going to dive into a formation that, you know, there's nothing out there on, at least video-wise, online about the history that we're fixing to talk about. This is the Bear Gulch Formation. Matt, what's the age of the fossils that we're finding? So, this material dates back to the Mississippian or early Carboniferous which would be right around 400 million years old. So, what was life like on the planet during this time? So, planet-wide, I'm honestly not sure, but here in this environment, it would have been a shallow tropical basin that was fairly close to shore, and we know that because there have been some terrestrial plants found here, but not a whole lot. So, most of it is further away. Okay, so on the land, you've got like, what, plants and trees and like that? Early, very, very early amphibians would have likely been around at that time. We know for sure they were around here in the Pennsylvania, so there's a really strong likelihood they were around here in the Mississippi. Yeah, but there's no dinosaurs running around. No, no. So, this is before the dinosaurs. Yeah. So, we're way before the dinosaurs in age. We're like at, what, 200 million years from dinosaurs? We're actually further away from dinosaurs in this period than we are in history from dinosaurs, if that makes any sense. So, we're in deep, deep, deep time, and in this deep era, there's not a whole heck of a lot of fossils that can be found, right? Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, and you get a lot of marine deposits, but as far as lagerstatens, where you have side spawning preservation, where you get soft tissue preservation, soft body organisms, there's not a whole lot. This is one of very few. So, what are all things? So, we're in a giant bay. The environment that we're looking at, the fossils that we're looking to find, what kind of things would we be finding? So, the real highlights for this deposit would be the stuff like the fish, the cargillaginous fish, technically sharks, but they're still pretty far off from what we know sharks to be nowadays, but then we also get several different types of shrimp, like the earliest manna shrimp can be found in this deposit. We get goniotides, which are a shelled cephalopod or squid. We get orthoconic cephalopods. We get worms. We get a ton of stuff. A lot of just these really soft-bodied things. That's interesting. So, all right, so we're at the edge of a cliff overlooking what are now mountains. If we were here 400 million years ago, what would we be looking at? It looked very similar to the Caribbean. Okay. Yeah. So, we're in like a Caribbean tropical environment back then. Basically, yeah. Okay, so now we're underwater. So, how deep are we underwater? What does this environment look like? You know, I'm not brushed up on the exact depth of the water at that time, but it would have been several hundred feet. So, the stuff that we're finding, it's would have been several hundred feet deep. Yeah, absolutely. So, Lund and Grogan back in the day, they did find a four meter or so long shark. Who's Lund? They were the two primary people that did the work on this deposit. They dug here for 50, 60 years, and now they've since retired as far as I know. But they are basically the only ones. There's one other lady, Williams, that did a little bit of work, but they did 90% of the work on this deposit. So, that's an interesting point that you're bringing up, is there's not been a lot of work done on this formation. Yeah. Why is that? Well, a lot of it is access. A lot of it is going to be the difficulty to work this stuff, because like you've seen so far, it's pretty sparse and scattered. This is some of the most complicated, like you got to put your thinking hat on. This is some of the most complicated fossil hunting I've ever had to do, and it's because how to get the fossils out of the rock. It's like, and we'll show you guys later in the episode, but it's a really complex process that I've never been exposed to, that it really blows my mind. And you're really figuring it out. Trying to. Dude, you're doing a great job of figuring it out. Thank you. But there has, but due to all of those factors, there's just not been a lot of dedicated academic scientific work that's been done on this formation. And that's so mind-blowing that here we have an entire era of time in this formation, and there's been so little work done on it. Yeah. So I mean, you're finding new species. Oh yeah. So last year, we actually, or a year before, we actually found a completely undocumented species of opioid brittle starfish. So a new species of brittle starfish. Yeah. And it could be a new genus because of how rare opioids are in the Mississippian of North America. In Europe and Africa, a lot more common, but here they're pretty much unheard of. Dude, that's insane. I know. That's just so cool. You can come to a spot like this and you can find things that are new to science. Oh yeah. That's epic. Yeah. So this is a really big site. Let's do this. Let's take off and give us a tour and show us around. Yeah, let's do it. You guys up for this? This is going to be a heck of an adventure. So right now we're headed to the next site, but I want an opportunity to talk to you guys and to talk to Matt about the accuracy of information. I know that we get a lot of comments and a lot of sticklers out there about, oh, well, that's not exactly right. So there's, especially when we're going to identifying species that we see out here, there's two different types of identification. Matt, what different types of identification do we have? So we have field IDs, which is where we find the fossil and we give it the best identification we can at that time. Right. But then after, say that fish I found earlier today, the Aesop ichthyid, I'll pull out my book of publications and I'll double check it to make sure everything is accurate because even one little variation can lead to a brand new species, or it can be, if you think it's something new, it could be something that's already known that you just missed the publication. That level of accuracy is extremely important, but we all get excited. We do. We all get excited and we get really hopeful for the things that we find. But Matt's got books and papers that are written. We'll show you a binder later on. It's literally everything that's online that exists on this formation and it's about that thick. That's how little is known about this formation and just how much still needs to be known. That's what's so cool. So we're also in literally the middle of nowhere, Montana, like there's nothing near us whatsoever. We're having to create the road. So the road that you see, I mean, this is, there's no road. There's absolutely no road. So we're, so forgive me if things are a little jarring or a little shaking, you know, we're, we're doing the very best that we can, but this is an opportunity for you guys to see fossils and learn about a formation that hardly anybody knows about or talks about because there, there's, there's nothing, there's nothing on YouTube. Like this is, when you guys watch this, this will be the only video on YouTube about Bear Gulch formation, which is fricking awesome. So forgive us if there's a little bit of shaking and a little bit of jarring. It's just the nature of hunting fossils out here. Matt, how remote is this out here? It's pretty remote. So the closest town is about 20 minutes away, but the closest city is closer to an hour. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So we're, we're, we're out in the middle of nowhere. Oh, yeah. Closest hospital is about an hour away. So, so if we get attacked by a bear, we're looking at an hour drive. Yeah. So let's not get attacked by bears. That's the goal. Yeah. That is definitely the goal. Lots of bears. We'll get into that in a little bit. What is the reason behind the armaments? This is only the second place that I've gone to where I've had to fossil, fossil hunt arm. And it's normally not, you normally don't, you know, you don't pack a rifle digging for fossil, fossil stuff. Out here, this isn't just a fossil site. It's wild country, the kind of place you don't just watch your footing. You watch your surroundings. Wolves move through these valleys. Cougars stalk the ridgelines and bears, a lot of bears roam these hills drawn in by the same land that brought us here, but not zero. And when you're an hour from the nearest hospital, not zero is something you take seriously. That's why we stay armed. Not for show, but because out here it's the responsible thing to do because the truth is we're just visitors walking through a world that still belongs to something else. So we've, we're in rock that's, you know, 400 million years old and it was once deep beneath us. Yes. What are the processes that brought it to the surface and how did this start to erode to expose the fossils? So most of the deposits up north here in Montana and, and throughout Wyoming, most of the north were, uh, they would not be exposed today if it wasn't for glacial or glaciers scraping it clear. Really? No way. That's cool. Yep. Yep. So it wasn't just the uplift from the Rockies being formed at this glacier. So how did that happen? Uh, well, you have the last ice age that rolled in and glaciers pushed out, receded, expanded, receded, uh, about four or five times if I remember right. And just like sandpaper, when that happens, it's taken the dirt down a level. So the glaciers were, is what exposed this. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's way cool. Yeah. So glaciers expose this. When were the first people noticing that there were fossils to be found in this formation? No, I'm not too sure. It wouldn't have been very much or very long before the, the site was originally worked by London Grogan and the earlier researchers in the sixties. Okay. So probably mid 20th century. Yeah. Say forties, fifties. That still blows my mind that, you know, this has only been explored for such a short amount of time. How many other places that are like that, that are out there fossil wise that still have to be explored or still being discovered? There are so many. And, you know, there's a lot of deposits that when you look up literature, we didn't find any fossils, but in a lot of cases there's nothing until there's something and they, you, you'll have pockets, you'll have isolated occurrences. Like say in the Aguja formation where I dig in West Texas, a lot of what I'm digging are isolated channels where you have this one pocket of material and then you won't have anything for however long until you hit another one. And same goes for the Permian deposits in Texas. You're digging channels, you're digging ponds, you're digging isolated occurrences. So, and see, this is a really important point that I want to get across to you guys is, is that we don't know everything. Like there is still science to be done. There's still research to be done. There's still things that need to be done. Not everything's been discovered. Not everything's been known. And you could get out there and discover something that nobody's ever found before and bring it to our collective understanding. And that's something that Matt is doing here by getting out and doing some more research. That's awesome, man. So when you find stuff, how much of it do you try to get the important stuff into the, into academia? I make a point to at least show academia what I'm finding. That way they can say, okay, yeah, we, we know about these and known about them for a long time. Oh, that's brand new. Like the ophiuroid brittle starfish I had mentioned. I've shown multiple institutions. Hey, I have this. And hopefully one day we find somebody that's willing to work on it. But my understanding is the ophiuroid experts are in Japan and Europe. Wow. That's it. So you're, so you're even having difficulty getting people to want to work on. Yeah. Well, it's not dinosaurs. Right. That's not as exciting. So how is that a problem? I think so. Yeah. Everybody wants to do dinosaurs. Yeah. Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs. Yeah. Dinosaurs aren't cool. Nobody likes dinosaurs. That's right. Dinosaurs stink. Nobody cares about dinosaurs. Urchins rule. Urchins are everything. But you know, it just leads into, you know, there's still a lot more out there that can be learned. And this is a great example of a site of many sites that are out there that still there needs to be done good science. And the only time that you're going to get that is doing what Matt's doing and getting out here in the field looking for the stuff. That's epic, dude. So this is, so how do you know where to look? So we're out here, we're kind of, we're at the top of a valley, kind of on top of a mountain. Yeah. We got fingers sticking out. How do you know where to look? So London Grogan did a lot of stratigraphy work, which is where they look at the different layers of the deposit and try to interpret it in a way that we can understand. And they established different horizontal zones that represent different sections of that environment. So we have like the center of the basin. We have the slopes of the basin. We have the marginal zone. We have the sponge reef complex. But then they also separated it vertically. So in order to get in there and find the fossils, I have to get the publications, take what they've learned, and then apply it on the day-to-day while I'm here on the site. That way I can get in there and, okay, I'm more productive in this section than that one, so on and so forth. So when you're saying the basin and the work that they've done, they basically mapped out what this environment looked like 400 million years ago. And this environment was, you know, out in the water, it was a big basin that was underwater. It had sides, it had, you know, shoreline, it had the whole nine yards. Yeah, they were even able to figure out what direction the shore would have been, even though that did not get preserved in the rock record. So how do you figure that out? The abundance of terrestrial plants is how they figured that out. So in, I believe it's to the west, they found more terrestrial plants than everywhere else. So they figured out the shore had to be that way. Exactly. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. That's awesome. So Matt, how dangerous is hunting out here? I mean, yeah, we got the bears, but, you know, this rock seems pretty unstable. It is, yeah. So you really have to watch out when you're digging a lot of these quarries. When I'm looking for a new site to dig, the first thing I do when I decide, okay, this looks pretty good, I get down below it and I check to make sure it's not overhung, or if it is, where is the overhang? Now, what do you mean overhung? Where you have a layer that comes out and there's nothing to support it. Oh, like a, yeah. Yeah. So at a certain point, you'll dig it down and then the rocks that were keeping that layer in place will just go, and that's happened a couple times. Oh, wow. Luckily, I was far enough away, my hand was the only thing touching that layer, so I didn't fall down or anything. But I mean, you're literally digging on the side of a cliff. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I mean, that's not in just a few places, that's everywhere. Correct. There's no like, oh, we're safe in the little thing. It's all like, I must keep my, I could die. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. The only way you can get it to where it's not a high enough fall to die is either by digging down to that slope or filling it in. And a lot of the places I've dug previously are already like that. Right. I got you. Yeah. Well, show us how dangerous this is. Yeah, for sure. Because this is crazy. Some of these get pretty insane. And if I die doing this, I'm okay. I am very, very okay. Doing what you love in a pretty place. Doing what I love, holding the camera, chasing history. I could die doing this, but I do it because I love it. So this site here, we call the cliff quarry. I dug it primarily last year. We're going to go down and I'm going to show you a spot, a section that I refuse to touch. Okay. This is the cliff quarry. I dug here a lot last year, mainly on that lower section. My buddy is digging this upper section and he's still working on it. There's a lot of spoil that you, I mean, there's a lot of overburden that you guys are throwing off. Oh, yeah. I mean, can you, is there a way to calculate how much you guys do? So the easiest way is just to measure the height or at least ballpark it. So like down there, when I originally started digging at that site, it was up to, here, we'll walk down there. It was up to this thick, hard layer here across the whole thing. And that cliff is about 30 feet, 35 feet. I have filled up 30 feet of spoil. So basically you went from that to that. Pretty much. That's insane. And that's between the rock that I removed and through the dirt that was covering it. You can see a little bit of slumpage going on that I still need to get off of this quarry. But yeah, I mean, I moved a lot of rock last year and I found a lot of really good stuff. So it was worth it. What kind of things are you finding in this quarry? So this quarry, I found a lot of really nice Tyrannophontis thyridians. What's that? That is an early mantis shrimp. And they had the same body plan as our modern mantis shrimp, but 400 million years back. And I also found several really, really nice, nice fish, including an Alanipterus montanus, several windy ichthys. But the real highlight was a small chimeroid about that big. And that is a shark, a type of shark that we still have around today. Ratfish would be a modern equivalent to that animal. So, but they're really, really rare. They're really weird. They're really unusual. So to be able to find one here was incredible. That's awesome, man. So as far as weathering goes, why do you have sections like this that are still, you know, that haven't broken down? But if you look above or below, it's all fractured and broken down into thin layers. Why are those spots like tables? It's too thick. It's too dense. But what caused it to be too thick? Because I mean, initially this was all straight limestone. I gotcha. You know, we go further back in the mountain, you know, it's solid limestone all the way through. It starts to fracture and weather away the closer to the edge that it gets. So, but in that weathering, why do you get thicker pieces and not thinner? Well, so the Bear Gulch limestone was deposited by season. So where we have this thick, really dense limestone, that'd be a wet season. Okay. Where you have this thin layer, it's really hard to see here, but further down about right here, this section would be a dry season. Okay. So you have a really big wet season. Wet season. You have a really narrow dry season. Dry season. Shorter wet season. Narrow dry season. Wet, dry, wet, dry, wet. That's cool. And it's just a sequence. So are there minerals that are being put into the water during those wet and dry seasons that are causing that not to fracture? Not that I'm aware of. There hadn't been many minerals. Of course, there are minerals because rocks are a combination of multiple minerals and so on and so forth. So these are, so these thicker, thinner bands are seasonal, seasonal events. You said that, you know, London and them were marking what layers are good. That's something that you're continuing to do? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So as you, as you find stuff, you're just not blowing through finding stuff and forgetting about it. You're finding stuff, recording it and trying to map this out and understand it better. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I mean, even though I'm not doing active research on this site, the material that I collect can and likely will, in a lot of cases, especially the significant stuff, end up in an institution and that kind of data is extremely important to collect and retain. Everything from, oh, the layer was this thick, it was surrounded by this, pictures, notes, maps. In the case of this stuff, it's not really worth mapping the horizontal position, but vertical, absolutely worth that. That's so cool that you can tell and figure that out. Oh yeah. Yeah. And that's all thanks to the work that London Grogan did for several decades. Nice. All right, what else we got? So right here, we have a very faint phyllo-carrot tail. So it's like a shrimp, but it would have been built a little bit differently. It's very close cousin to them. These guys are not super common, but we do find them semi-frequently. Okay. We also have a coprolite. Everybody knows coprolites. For those that don't know coprolite, that is fossil poop. How often do you get fossil? Oh my god, all the time. So that's a good sign because if you find the coprolites, you're probably going to find a fish. Right. Yeah. Any idea to tell what species? So you can tell the shark from all the other animals because shark coprolites, even modern sharks, have a coil. So if it has a coil, it's a shark. If it doesn't have a coil, some kind of fish or something else. Wait, wait, wait, hold on. Stop. Stop the presses. Stop the presses. Sharks have coiled poop? Yes. Are you serious? I'm dead serious. It's a beautiful coil. It's just the shape of their intestines. See what you'll figure out on Chasing History. I bet when this video started, you had no idea that sharks had corkscrew coprolites. Now you know that sharks have corkscrew coprolites. What kind of information is that? That's awesome information. That's what that is. That's trivia night winning information. You're welcome. Be sure to subscribe. What's up, guys? I'm so sorry to stop you in the middle of an episode, but we really need your help. Chasing History is brought to you by my business, the Smoky Mountain Relic Room, which is the largest diversity of history for sale anywhere in North America. If I had my choice, I would be doing nothing but out there making documentaries for you guys to learn some cool history from. But unfortunately, we got to pay the bills. Chasing History is completely funded by Smoky Mountain Relic Room. So if you get a chance and you want to check out some cool history, go to our website, therelicroom.com. We're easy to find. If you want to check out our social media, Smoky Mountain Relic Room, you can't miss us. But if you see some stuff there that you like, man, we would love to get some cool history into your hands. But if you don't, then do, just pass it on and share it with somebody else. But if you want to support this channel, go to therelicroom.com or google Smoky Mountain Relic Room. Guys, really, that would be epic. I love you all. Remember, guys, history rocks. Woo! After taking a look from the top of the cliff So this pillar here, like I said before, was originally laid down flat. But this one got undercut enough due to differential weathering, which is where different layers will erode at different rates, that it actually collapsed. This one would have been dug years ago, which is part of where a lot of this debris comes from. But the majority of it fell off when that top half of it slumped over. So a lot, some of the quarries we dig are at a slant. The reason they're at a slant instead of laid down flat is because of stuff like this. So this is evidence of the erosion processes that basically are happening over the millions of years and really every single day. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So in this deposit, you have softer marley layers in between the thicker limestone in a lot of cases. And those, when they get wet and they've been exposed for a long period of time, they turn to mud. And when that mud washes out, then you end up with the limestone jutting out. And that whole process is called differential weathering, where one layer is softer than the other and causes it to be undercut. So you've got layers that are staying solid. And then the layers underneath, when they get exposed to rain, wind, whatever, they turn to mud and weaken what's underneath. But those harder layers stay solid. Yes. And just as the weaker stuff gets further and further back into the hill, then you get the collapse. Absolutely. And so over the millions of years, this valley, that's basically the processes that exposed this valley along with the glacial, you know. Absolutely. Everything. Yep. Yep. Yep. That's cool. So this is evidence of active erosion continuing to erode this mountain to where there'll be nothing left in, you know, 100 million years. Oh, less than that, probably a few thousand. How long do you think this will last before it's all washed away? So the deposit itself, there's no telling. It could take thousands upon thousands of years. This individual column, I give it a few hundred years before it's finally completely eroded down and it's just a grassy knob. And that's unless vegetation takes hold and stabilizes that spot there in particular. But at that point, it's destroying the fossils. So what we're seeing now is probably only going to last a couple hundred years. I think so at most. That's insane. And the tragedy of it is, is that all the fossils are going to be lost with it. Like these are all, this isn't, you know, tailings pile. Yeah. This is all undug fossil material that's scattered out. That's now lost to time. Have you tried to go back through this and dig it and see if there's anything? I actually found a fish last year. I believe it was right up there. I hauled it out, but yeah. And then a couple of weeks ago came down here and we found some really good cephalopods. So yeah, there is stuff. Unfortunately, because a lot of it slumped off like the blocky limestone, like this one here, it's not going to get the erosion process that we need to expose the fossils. So it's a very specific way you want it to erode. And in a pile like this, you just don't get that relief that you would if it's laid down flat in a layer. Gotcha. So for this site in particular, why do you have soft-bodied organisms that are fossilized? Because you don't see that in like the Hell Creek formation or, you know, other places around the world very often. Yeah. So with this site, it ultimately comes down to that low oxygen environment, prevents it from being scavenged. Steady, fine-grained sediment being deposited. So it's a nice even layer, covers organisms up and voila. So it seems like the fine-grained sediment's a really important part of this. Yes, yes it is. And fine-grained sediments for fossil preservation is extremely important because like with a coarse-grained sandstone, you're probably not going to find much, if anything. Right, right. And that's like what we were talking about earlier, you know, when things are compacted together, you know, the atoms, for lack of a better word, can't escape, whereas through that coarse sand, it leaves spaces that those organic compounds can more likely escape out of. Yeah. As the day carries on, Matt and Chase return to the dig site. Before long, Matt makes an exciting discovery, a remarkable fish fossil, and we'll dive into how he found it in just a moment. Matthew, what do we got? We've got a very rare fish called a Disco Sara. There's a chance it's a Guida ichthys, but more likely to be a Disco Sara. So they look very similar to our modern angelfish. Okay. We've got positive and the negative here. Oh, wow. That's awesome. I've only ever found one of these. I found it last year at another quarry. Can you turn it around so we can see it? Yeah, look at that. So we have the skull. Dorsal fin is folded down. It doesn't appear to be opened up. Then the tail over on this side. Very round fish. Looks like, yeah, it is. It looks like a little sunfish. So you spotted this from the spot. Yes. So what's your next step here? So, well, first off, tell me about this fish. What do we know about it? So Disco Sara and Guida ichthys, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, are very closely related to most of our modern fish. They pop up in the Paleozoic and they kind of disappear for a little while and they pop back up in the Mesozoic. Okay. I can't remember exactly if it was Jurassic, Cretaceous or what, but there are close cousins found in Lebanon and I believe in Solnhofen as well. So this is a pretty rare fish. This is a very rare fish. This is the exact kind of fish we want to find. Nice. So what's your next step now? Because, I mean, it seems like just this wind's going to blow it away. Oh yeah. Get back, dog. So she's very curious. She is. You want to be on camera? Yes, you do. You want to be on camera. We got rare fish. You can't be You just stay right there. Okay. Here, I'll sit next to you. Wow. Here, you watch this. Watch your dad brush this off. So unfortunately, because of the weathering, a lot of it has powdered and there's no way to save that. So that whole fish, that's what's left of the organic material. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. This isn't like we're chasing shadows in the rock or anything like that. We are chasing the actual fish. How different is this from the Green River Formation stuff, the split fish in Wyoming? It's very similar. The rock is a lot harder, but because they're both lagerstatens, the preservation is going to be very similar. Now, in the Green River, you have multiple different layers, like 18-inch you can prep down to and get good three-dimensional fish. We don't have that here. All we have are basically split fish. Most of them, what you see when you split the rock, is what you get. But it's not like a split. We'll get into more of that later. Oh yeah. And sometimes you get a perfect, even split. In this case, most of the fish is on one side, but then we have most of the skull on the bad side. So between the two sides, we have the whole thing. So it's already starting to fade a little bit. Yeah. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to brush all the loose debris off of it, and then we're going to spray it, and that'll help keep the rest of the fish intact. And that way, I can get it back, get it re-trimmed. I'll repair this crack here. That way, we can make it a nice, even square. All right. Well, show us your process. Lightly brush it off. The powdered sections of the fish, there's nothing we can really do to save that. So instead of creating more hassle when I go to prep it, I'll just remove it. Now what are you using? So I use Rust-Oleum Matte Clear. It's really easy to remove a little bit of acetone and some Q-tips, and you can take it off. So this is something that you're putting on in the quarry as a way to get it from the quarry to your prep lab? Exactly. And then once I get it back to the lab, I will remove the Rust-Oleum off of either the whole thing or just around where there's no fossil, and I'll reapply it to only the fossil. Okay. Yeah. And that way, it stands out a little bit better, but say an institution acquires it, they can easily remove it if they need to. God, that's such a cool fish, man. Yeah. Now check this out. It's about to really pop. It makes a huge difference. Holy cow. Yeah. That's freaking night and day. And you couldn't even tell the reddish-brown color on it. I mean, it is incredible how much of a difference it makes. That is awesome. And when the rock is a little bit wet, it will split and it will look like that. Then it dries back out. It fades. A lot of the time, it'll flake. So either way, in that case, we would have to- Can I pick it up? Yeah, yeah. Go for it. Guys, I'm trying to get a close-up of this, but it's kind of hard in this light, so forgive me. I'm trying to do the best we can. Pop this one out. There you can see the fish. Wow. So just like in the Green River, you get a lot of positive and negatives. Yeah, yep, yep. Man, this is awesome. I know. So what's your next step for this fish? So I'm actually going to walk this to the truck. I don't have my saw down here with me, but I do have a concrete saw in the truck, and I've got a tile saw up in another spot. So after this dries, I'll walk it up, I'll put it in the truck, and when we get back to camp, I'll trim it down real quick, just to make it smaller and less heavy to take back home. Man, that's awesome. Nice. Fine, dude. It's been a long day. Heck, yeah. It has moved a lot of rock. Yes, we have. All that rock up there. Oh, yeah. To find this one little guy. Well, what's cool is, I mean, it's a species that's similar to what we've got today. It disappears, it pops up in different eras, and so that's just, ah, man, dude, that's super freaking cool. God, it's so cool. That's so freaking cool. Ah, dude, that's awesome. All right, good, fine. So Matt, what's special about this finger particular? Because you've got names for all your different spots and sites. A lot of them, yeah. Names or numbers. Names or numbers. Or both. Yeah. Yeah. So what's special about this one out here? So this one here is one that got dug previously, either by the previous commercial digger or by London Grogan. I have no idea which. And they dug it down to a certain level and then they left it. Okay. So this one is going to be a little bit below or at the lower section of the upper Bear Gulch. And what we want is below that. So with all the weathering that's occurred, because they exposed a lot of material and it just left it to erode, we should do really well. So once my helper comes in this evening, this is his first job tomorrow to clear this off. Just clear this off. Get it ready, get it prepped. Yep, yep. And then once we finish where we've been digging, we'll move over here. Okay, cool. Yeah. Well, let's go look at some other spots. Yeah, let's do it. All right. Hey, Jay, so I've got the silica layer I mentioned. Okay. You can see that gray band. And if we look at the cross section of the limestone, we see one here, see one there. So those gray bands are the silica layers that you were talking about. Correct. So you use that as a way to identify that, you know, this is where you are in the formation and this stuff doesn't produce a lot of fossils. Correct. Yeah. Even though we're finding fossils. Oh yeah. I mean, right here, there were a couple of bivalves left right on the surface. Oh, nice. To have pretty good contrast. You don't see these as often. Yeah. It's like the goniotites or the tunicates and whatnot. Gotcha. Yeah. But just because, you know, they didn't find much doesn't mean that there isn't stuff here. Correct. Yeah. Okay. I've already dug in the upper member on this trip and I'll show you that site. And I did find, it was worth digging. I found some good stuff. Cool. Yeah. What do you got? So right here we have a small goniotite, Anthracocerous Beargulchensis. Okay. So this one has been on the surface since the deposit cleared, it dished out and the red color is because of that weathering and the iron content oxidized, which makes it stand out a little bit more. That's awesome. So this is like a little, a little shell, a little mussel shell. Yeah. A shelled squid. Gotcha. Like an ammonite. Yeah. Yeah. A distant cousin. They're actually an ammonoid. Okay. And so this shows you about what the weathering can do out here. Oh, absolutely. And, and I mean, in this, in a lot of cases, the fossils are within these dishes or they're in thin layers, but the, to be able to find the dishes, that is the sign that it's weathered enough that we can actually find critters like that. Okay. Well, we'll get into the dishes here after a while, but that's way cool that just on the surface, there you go. Flipped one rock. So, you know, this is a good finger to open up. Oh yeah. We're going to have a good time here. Nice. Oh yeah. Just before the team called it a day, Matthew found himself a pretty impressive find. What you got Matt? Oh, I've got an even better fish than yesterday. Yeah. This is a Aesop Ichthyid, probably Aesop Ichthys. They are very, very rare. I've only ever found one and it was in really rough shape. This one is phenomenal in comparison. Dude, that's awesome. Oh dude, I know. And this hasn't even been sprayed yet and for it to have that much detail and color. How rare is this fish? It, so this is one of the fish that were actually described more recently. If I remember right, it was about 2010 it got described. So this was an unknown species until 2010. Roughly. I'll have to double check the paper when I go in to check the ID, because there's a couple Aesop Ichthyids that are found here, but very, very unusual. Very rare to find. You seem to be holding back a little bit. Don't hold back. I'm trying not to. Well, let's spray it. See what it looks like. Use a little brush. Get the debris off. That's killer. So what's the story with this fish? One way you want to know, I might be able to tell you. Well, so what, is there any modern ancestors? This would be a distant relative to basically all of our modern actinopterygiae. During the, when the Bear Gulch limestone was being deposited, both the fish and the sharks had a big explosion. They were filling ecological niches as quick as they could. And this is one of those that resulted to it. So while it doesn't have any direct modern descendants, it's like T-Rex to chickens. Right. This to our bony fish. So what, so any bony fish that's out there, and when you mean bony fish, what do you mean by? So like basically most of the fish you think of bass, marlin, salmon would be another bony fish. So just fish with really thick, dense, heavy bones. So this is the grandfather to a lot of those or close enough. I would call it a distant relative. 300th cousin twice removed or so. That's awesome. Wow. Really turned out great. Oh yeah. And I mean, and even still, I mean, you know, you're all psyched and Jones because this turned out really good, but it's still really faint. Oh yeah. I mean, it's crazy how faint this stuff is. Is that common for stuff in this formation to be this faint? Yeah. You can get them more obvious, more pronounced. So there's the other side there. But a lot of the time, especially because the limestone is so hard, we're having to dig and dig where it's heavily weathered because of that. You're going to have some imperfections. That's a good 400 million years. I mean, anybody would be a little rough, right? Yeah. Yeah. For real. But yeah, now we can kind of see now a really exciting detail about this is that big dark spot there on the skull is most likely the pigments from the eye. No way. You're basically looking at a fish eyeball right there. That's crazy. Dude, that's so cool. What? So how much of this soft tissue is preserved like that? I mean, is that a common denominator in this quarry? It's a pretty common thing to see because this is a lager stat, which basically translates to a site of unique preservation. So other lager stats would be like the green river formation, which you won't get as much soft tissue preservation, but you get great preservation overall. Solnhofen, the Burgess Shale, the Lebanese deposits, they all are considered lager stats. And then Bear Gulch is by far one of the most famous because you get the soft bodied organisms like the tunicates and the worms. And there's even there's been sharks found that had when they were scanned, they had organs that had nerve endings and pigments and everything. That's insane. So how is it possible that that soft material can be preserved? A very fine sediment with low oxygen content. So the key is the low oxygen content. Combined with the fine sediment. You need very, very fine grain sediment. So why is it that fine grain sediments make these details stay preserved as opposed to more coarse grain sediment? So I am not 100% on that, but my understanding is it's because it locks everything in more so less is able to penetrate fewer bacteria, fewer everything else, but I could be way off. Okay. So it's kind of like a net where the bigger the holes that are in the net, the more things that can get in and can get out, the tighter the net, the less things can get in and can get out. And that's kind of like comparing to a sand sediment and a really fine sediment like this with it being a fine sediment, it's really packed. It's really in there tight. You know, whereas a coarse sandy sediment, it's packed in there tight, but it's still loose, small enough for microscopic organisms to penetrate through and get in and out. Yeah, I believe that's it. But again, fact check me because I could be off a little bit. It's been a long time. All right guys, fact check us out there. If you, if we're totally freaking off, throw, throw down in the comments, be like, Nope, you guys are off. It's not the deal. You know, we're trying to simplify this for everybody, for all audiences. So if there's people that are out there in our audience that know the answer, for sure the answer to that question, throw it down in the comments. Matt, dude, this is awesome, dude. Yes. So as far as making your day, how much does this make your day? I'm about to pack it up and go eat lunch. Yeah, you're done. Really, I got a lot more rocks to move. I'm more motivated now. Heck yeah, man. Nice finds. One final shot of that, dude. That's awesome. That's a killer fish. That's awesome. Good find. Yep. Yep. Straight to the truck. Stay tuned as Chase and Matthew returned to the very quarry that sparked the research behind the Bear Gulch Formation. What they've already uncovered is just the beginning and new discoveries are awaiting beneath the surface, but getting there won't be easy. Before they can uncover what's next, they'll have to push through some of the most treacherous terrain yet, because out here, every step forward comes at a cost and every layer holds the potential to change what we know forever. I could sense it coming. He looks good. That's a good hat. You know, that's a- It's worn. It's a fish. Oh, I didn't see that. Oh, yeah. No, and check this out. I can sew that. So can she. I gotta- Well, she brought me a spare hat, but it's in her check luggage. I could sew that really easy. I'm not your wife. I'm gonna have her put a whole new mesh on there. Oh, okay. Yeah, because the problem is it's rotten. Oh, yeah. So check this out. You see the color there? Yep. That's what color it's supposed to be. You know, the sun's pretty freaking devastating. You want to know how devastating the sun is? Look at that. That's what it's supposed to be. That's when you're out in the sun a bunch. The sun is- It destroys these rocks. That's cool. Yeah, put it on your head. You look great. Okay. Thank you. Got you. Guys, you're gonna have to bear with us for this, because this is the first time I've used this type of camera setup, and I'm not Survivorman, but I'm learning how to do the ankles right. So- Here, let me go on this side. I think that would- Yes. Yeah, there we go. Oh, there we go. Much better. Yeah, stay on this side. Don't worry, guys. Hey, man, this is Chasing History. We don't have a billion dollars. We're not Mr. Beast. Dude, we're just freaking fossil nerds. Mr. History. Right. One day. One day. Not there yet. One day. We're just a couple of freaking history nerds out here trying to do this. So forgive the shake, and we're going to try to make this work. This is the first time I've used this setup, and Matt's been awesome enough to let me practice with him. So, okay. Well, let's go check out one of these fingers. Yeah, for sure. Got you. And it's a great place to throw your sport. Oh, man. You know, Utah Dump Digger, they came out with that invention, the cliff, but they never patented it. They didn't. No, no. I sent it off to China, and we had it improved. Now, we have three-sided cliffs. First guy. Patent pending. Man, Utah Dump Digger, man, they invented the cliff. Look it up. A cliff. It's genius. If you're digging something, you just throw it off to the side, and it disappears. It's insane. It just totally goes away. Definitely worth looking up Utah Dump Digger. Yeah, yeah. That's right. So, Isaac, what's one of the reasons why these fossils are here? I mean, how- Yes. How excited are you? ------- game time. Yes. Man, man. Let me just show you something. Did you hear Kat? No. I don't listen to her. We're married. I don't have to. What do we got? Look how close it was being off the rock. So, where was it on the rock? Oh, dude. It was right on the edge. So, that whole section is gone. Yeah. If it was a little, an eighth of an inch further, we'd be missing part of the thing, but I mean.