Hell Creek, Montana

The Hell Creek area is one of the most well studied K-Pg sections due to the common preservation of everyone's favorite fossils, dinosaurs. Less popular, but more interesting (to me anyway), are the well preserved freshwater bivalves found throughout this area. Due to variability in freshwater oxygen and carbon isotopes, traditional stable isotopic techniques have been less useful in terrestrial settings. I am employing a relatively new, but more technologically challenging, stable isotope method - clumped isotope thermometry - in order to reconstruct paleotemperatures here. We are also supplementing these approaches with shallow sediment coring.