by Steve Waldhauser
Most paleontologists spend their entire careers hoping to unearth a new species. Owen Anfinson found one between his sophomore and junior years of college.
Anfinson, a Northfield, Minn., native who is now a senior at Gustavus Adolphus College, is a geology major with minors in geography and anthropology/sociology. During the summer of 2003, he traveled to Dinosaur National Monument in Utah to participate in the Reconstructing Rivers Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU), a program funded by the National Science Foundation and supported by Gustavus. Julie Maxson, then a visiting assistant professor of geology at Gustavus, headed the eight-student research group, which included two Gusties—Anfinson and Evan Christianson, a Hutchinson, Minn., native who is also now a senior. Brooke Swanson ’00, now a graduate student in geology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was an on-site teaching assistant.
The students were assigned to geological study projects in the so-called Cedar Mountain Formation on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land about two miles northwest of the monument site. On July 11, while working in the uppermost section of the Dakota sandstone formation that rises above the Cedar Mountain Formation, Anfinson and his digging partner, Eric Gulbranson, an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, broke apart a sandstone slab that revealed 96-million-year-old bird tracks. The tracks, which were made in fine-grain sand that once formed part of the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway, a large inland sea that spanned North America from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, proved to be those of a new ichnospecies with the working name Aquatilavipes demscottis. The finders earned the privilege of naming the new species: “dem” for Tim Demko, a professor at UMD who is Gulbranson’s mentor, and “scott” for Anfinson’s father, Scott Anfinson, a state archaeologist with the State Historical Preservation Office at the Minnesota State Historical Society.
The tracks are significant because they represent the first vertebrate fossil found in the Dakota Formation in Utah. They are only the fifth locality of the ichnogenus in the world, and the first in the United States. Aquatilavipes, whose morphology has been compared to that of a modern killdeer, is among a select few of the earliest shorebird tracks known. Coincidentally, the ichnogenus was first described by Canadian paleontologist Philip Currie, who was a lecturer at the 2003 Nobel Conference at Gustavus. In fact, Currie and his wife, Eva, were a great help to Anfinson in the early stages of researching the tracks.
Anfinson returned to the Reconstructing Rivers REU site in the summer of 2004 with fellow students Alec Nord, a senior from Stillwater, Minn., and Julia Anderson, a junior from Eagan, Minn., and geology professor Russell Shapiro, who served as guide and group leader. In between other REU geology projects, he and Nord extracted the slabs from the field.
A minor territorial dispute arose as the significance of the find was revealed. Because it was made on BLM land, the slabs containing the tracks are government property. They are being held at their permanent repository, Dinosaur National Monument, where Anfinson has been working with Martin Lockley, dinosaur and bird track specialist from the University of Denver, to measure and catalog them. However, they may make their way to the Science Museum of Minnesota some day.
Meanwhile, Anfinson has presented a summary paper on the tracks at the 2003 Geological Society of America’s national meeting in Seattle, Wash., and will do so again this November in Denver, Colo. With helpful editing assistance from Shapiro, he will be submitting a paper, co-authored with Lockley, Maxson, and Gulbranson, by December or early 2005 for publication in a professional journal.
After graduating from Gustavus in May 2005, Anfinson plans to attend graduate school in geomorphology or paleontology.