EDWARD B. DAVIS

Stratigraphy and geomagnetic correlation of fossil bearing beds in Virgin Valley, Thousand Creek, and Massacre Lake beds, northwest Nevada.
The current focus of my field work is prospecting and correlating known and new fossil localities in the Miocene volcaniclastic beds of northwestern Nevada. These areas are already well-constrained geochronologically because of radiometric and tephrochronologic dates on the abundant ashes interbedded with the clastic sediments. Unfortunately, the fossil deposits were mostly collected before modern paleontologic methods were established, and the abundant sites are able to be correlated only on the gross basis of the formation within which they are found. My fieldwork focuses on stratigraphic correlation of individual localities, with an ultimate goal of placing the abundant fossil collections from these areas into a detailed stratigraphic series. In the end, the fossils from Thousand Creek and Virgin Valley may represent as good a record as those from the Stewart Valley complex of southwestern Nevada.
The Massacre Lake beds come from a single horizon, and they are constrained by a radiometric date on their upper boundary. Because of the biostratigraphically important first appearance of proboscidea in this assemblage, using magnetostratigraphic techniques to better constrain the assemblage could answer long-standing questions about the speed with which proboscidea spread across North America.