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Henry C Fricke

Here we document the occurrence of locally common oncoids in the Cedar Mountain Formation of Utah in the Woodside Anticline area of the San Rafael Swell and use them to understand changes in the Early Cretaceous landscape and their effects on the dinosaur fauna. Detailed facies analysis is required to understand the context of these changes within the broader patterns of Mesozoic tectonics and the fossil record. Oncolite crops out in the Cedar Mountain Formation, directly overlying the Buckhorn Conglomerate. Oncolite is not widely distributed outside of the Woodside Anticline area. The oncoids are found in a bimodal population with the majority in the 2–5-cm-diameter range and a smaller population >25 cm in diameter....
Empirical estimates of climate parameters such as mean annual temperature (MAT) are essential to describe both ancient climate and to ground truth climate model simulations of past climates. In terrestrial settings, no single proxy record is able to provide detailed temporal yet geographically widespread information, and it thus becomes essential that paleoclimatic information obtained from different proxies be comparable. As an example of how to compare estimates, and to illustrate what can be learned by doing so, we measured oxygen isotope ratios of phosphate in the tooth enamel of fossil mammals and the body scales of freshwater fish in order to estimate the mean annual temperature (MAT) in which they lived....
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