BlO—Lancaster Farming, Saturday, September 1,1984
What kind of sweets do
pelicans like? PeIiCANDY.
What do you get when you
cross a yellow songbird with
a pelican? A peIiCANARY.
How does a pelican see
at night? It carries a
peIiCANDLE.
What is a pelican that gives
up? A peIiCANT.
What do you call a bird that
won’t give up? A peIiCAN.
GRAND CANYON, Ariz. - The
same thing that made the fossils so
hard for the scientists to find is
what protected them for 12,000
years; they are so inaccessible to
man as well as to any other large
mammals.
The fossils are in a series of
caves along the majestic sheer
Redwall limestone cliffs near the
bottom of the Grand Canyon, down
where the raging Colorado River
did its work over millions of years,
tearing the land apart and leaving
it unreachable by man or beast.
But the Colorado did not reckon
with modern mountain-climbing
equipment, or with contemporary
camping gear, or with the zeal of
scientists out to answer questions
they consider important.
So this year, for the first time, a
handful of men and one woman
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Try these pelican
Arduous Grand Canyon trek yields condor fossils
scaled the cliffs and entered about
15 of those caves. They found the
skulls, bones, even feathers of
condors that may have used the
caves as nesting and roosting sites
in Pleistocene times.
Cross-country Team <
Heading the scientific team was
Steve Emslie, 30, a graduate
student at the University of
Florida with an interest in fossil
birds. With him were Jim Mead,
32, an assistant professor at the
University of Maine and a veteran
of studying fossil remains in the
Grand Canyon, and Mead’s wife,
Emilee, 26, a scientific
photographer and illustrator.
With the aid of climbers Larry
Coats and Dave Dawson, they
spent 35 days floating down the
Colorado, climbing cliffs,
photographing and mapping
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caves, and collecting specimens
from the surface and beneath it.
The trip had its origins in a visit
by Emslie to the Grand Canyon in
1983, in the company of scientist
friends.
“I noticed a lot of caves on the
vertical cliffs, and thought they
would be good for fossil birds,”
Emslie recalls. “The cliff walls are
limestone, and limestone is good
for cave formation. The caves
were large enough and deep
enough to make them attractive
for nesting or roosting without
large animals entering and
disturbing nests. And California
condors are known to use caves to
nest in.”
Emslie received permission
from the National Park Service to
do a preliminary study of the cave.
With the aid of climbers Coats and
if 9
BCSMD COCOAS 8-30-'39 gk
Dawson, he spent 21 days in the
area, entering several caves and
finding fossil remains of condors,
mountain goats, and other animals
on the surface.
Encouraging Start
Encouraged, he designed a
lengthier research project for this
summer, enlisted the aid of the
Meads, and applied for and
received financial support from
the National Geographic Society.
The team used four boats, each
piloted by a Colorado River
boatman, and had the help of other
support personnel.
Emslie hoped to answer the
question of whether a condor that
has been assigned by scientists to a
species of its own and that has been
assumed to be extinct was instead
a California condor subspecies.
The fossils he found should help
Au
3ri
answer the question if, as he ex
pects, theyn are dated to the late
Pleistocene. The key find, “a
beautiful specimen” found in a
cave the team named after its
discoverer, Larry Stevens, is a
complete condor skull so well
preserved that skin remains at
tached to it.
“It’s got all of the beak intact,
and some of the small bones un
derneath in the palate area,”
Emslie says enthusiastically.
Emslie has compared his find
with condor skulls found at the
Rancho La Brea in Los Angeles,
but is so far unable to provide a
definitive answer to the question of
whether it was a separate, now
extinct species. He has some
notions about what happened,
however.
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(Turn to Page Bll)
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