Our NSF-funded project, Developing and Testing New Geospatial Approaches in Paleoanthropology, is an attempt to apply new tools and techniques from the geographic sciences to the search for and recovery of fossil remains that can inform us about the history of life on our planet. 

Intellectual Merits

Finding fossils is physically demanding work, often involving field crews of upwards of a dozen individuals driving across dirt tracks in rugged terrain and hiking for miles with eyes cast downward, looking for evidence of fossils being eroded at the earth’s surface.  While good preparation and understanding of the local deposits is essential to find new fossil deposits, the history of paleontology suggests that success or failure is often the result of luck or serendipity. 

Through collaboration between a paleoanthropologist and a geographer, we have developed several different predictive models for the location of fossil deposits that can increase the efficiency and decrease the cost of fossil-collecting expeditions anywhere in the world.  We used satellite imagery of our research area in Wyoming (a 10,000 km² sedimentary basin known as the Great Divide Basin) and a variety of different analytical approaches (notably including an artificial neural network) to identify the “spectral signature” of known productive localities (i.e., those places where fossils had been found in the past).  With this knowledge in hand, we were able to then “virtually search” the entire Great Divide Basin for other areas (often places that we had never visited) that shared the spectral signature of productive localities.  We then visited these areas in order to “ground-truth” the predictive models.  Our work has led to the identification of a number of new fossil-bearing localities, often in places we would have never prioritized in our search for fossils. 

While models of this sort still need to be further developed, improved, and tested in the field, we are confident that our work clearly demonstrates the potential of predictive modeling to inform and improve the ways that we search for fossils, and that this will inevitably lead to a greater understanding of the history of life.

Broader Impacts

We trained both undergraduate and graduate students in our new, interdisciplinary approach to doing field work in paleoanthropology, and have clearly demonstrated the utility of collaborative work between anthropologists and geographers.  In addition to several male undergraduate and graduate students in Anthropology, we trained several females undergraduate students in the field (2 of whom are now in graduate school in biological anthropology), and one (an African American student) who has graduated and is applying for medical school.   We have presented our work at many conferences in several disciplines, including Anthropology, Vertebrate Paleontology, and Geography, as well as at K-12 schools and at other Universities.  We have created an active social media presence for our fieldwork by creating a dedicated Facebook page and Twitter account, and have a number of professional publications in various stages of preparation that will further disseminate our work to professional paleoanthropologists, geographers and remote sensing specialists, and vertebrate paleontologists.  Finally, our research has been widely disseminated to the public via traditional print media (e.g., newspapers and magazines), online publications and websites, and television (a 30 minute public television special produced and broadcast by North Carolina Public TV).

Last Modified: 10/02/2015
Modified by: Robert L Anemone