Heather Stottman joined my lab as a master's student in the spring of 2002. For some reason, taking my Evolution class and my Systematics and Classification graduate seminar in the same semester didn't frighten her off completely. She has begun work on a study of fossils preserved in siderite (iron carbonate) concretions from the coal-bearing rocks of the Arkansas River Valley region in this state. These appear to be broadly similar to the much better-known fossils in siderite concretions found at Mazon Creek and surrounding regions of northeastern Illinois.
	Kudos and congratulations to graduate student Karen McDonald, who has completed her master's thesis project. In the summer of 2000 she began looking at the paleoecology of the Imo Formation, the latest Mississippian (Chesterian) rocks in northern Arkansas. The Imo is rich in molluscs and other things, and the taxonomy of its many fossils has been worked up pretty thoroughly, but its paleoecology is something no one's really tackled before. Karen presented a more complete and integrated paleoecological reconstruction of the Imo Formation than I've seen anyone else come up with; we'll continue to collaborate on getting this work published and on various other projects, such as the following. . . On a field trip to the famous "Peyton Creek" Imo Formation locality in the spring of 2000, undergraduate Amy Overman found, to my amazement, a fossil ophiuroid, or "brittle starfish". Brittle stars aren't common fossils (there's a reason why they're called "brittle" stars. . . ). Amy's find wasn't a fluke, however; I've made many trips to the site since then, and always come back with more fossil brittle stars. (Including the one pictured above left, which we're referring to the genus Encrinaster, and the one above right, which we're referring to the genus Aganaster.) Dr. F. H. C. Hotchkiss and Dr. John Harper are working with us on their taxonomy, and eventually we'll get around to publishing a formal description. Karen presented a ' poster on these ophiuroids at the GSA Annual Meeting in Reno, Nevada, in the fall of 2000. Here is a preprint of this poster's text and illustrations. We have also found undescribed brachiopods, plants, vertebrates, and other things in the Imo Formation, which we are working on writing up as time permits.
	Undergraduate researcher Ryan Atkins has finished his training on the new SEM -- and has also graduated and gone on to other things. He took on on a project involving describing bioimmured fossils from the Cretaceous of north Mississippi and southwestern Arkansas. Bioimmuration is an unusual but not at all uncommon method of fossil preservation: When an organism like an oyster cements itself to a substrate and overgrows it, it may make a very accurate natural mold of the substrate on its attachment surface. If the attachment surface was another organism -- such as a shell -- or had other organisms growing on it, the attachment scar may preserve natural molds of these organisms. This may be the only way that certain organisms can be preserved in the fossil environment. Ryan sorted a couple of hundred fossil oysters. Further examination revealed a bunch of strange fossils preserved by bioimmuration, not all of which we can identify yet. The thing pictured on the left that looks vaguely like spaghetti is -- I think -- a mold of a filamentous blue-green bacterium (or cyanobacterium) that bored microscopic holes in rocks and shells, as do many cyanobacteria today. The filaments are only about five microns (millionths of a meter) across.
	In May and June of 2000, I pursued several lines of fieldwork in the desert, looking mostly at Cambrian outcrops in the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts of California and Nevada. UCA undergraduate Sara Richardson, depicted at right, came along to do all the hard work and heavy lifting. For some reason it didn't seem to work out that way, as I still had stuff to tote. However, to her credit, Sara did not throw anything at me when I got the truck stuck in sand somewhere near Chambless, California. In today's rough-and-tumble academic environment, hiring assistants who don't throw things at you is becoming increasingly important to today's academics. Anyway, we both learned a lot, I now have material for several papers, and I took some time on the way back to visit some places we'd never seen. The picture depicts Delicate Arch, part of Arches National Park, near Moab, Utah. Sara's now gone on to graduate school at Idaho State University. . . .