Did ancient wildfire end in barbecue?
By Sid Perkins
From Mexico City, at the 60th annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology
While wildfires raced out of control across much of the western United States this summer, evidence of a blaze that occurred about 74 million years ago was coming to light in the Bighorn Basin of central Wyoming.
During 10 days of fieldwork this August, Marilyn D. Wegweiser, a geologist at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., collected numerous remains from a 1-centimeter-thick layer of ash that appears in outcrops and sediments of the area. Walking along a mile of the layer, she filled two medium-size canvas bags with fossils that included fragments of large bones and scraps of petrified wood.