Wyoming
Why Scientists Are Going Bonkers Over Four 38-Million-Year-Old…
Around 38 million years ago, three small snakes slithered into a burrow seeking shelter from an apocalypse blanketing their world in volcanic ash. They never escaped, becoming entombed in the spot where they sought sanctuary in what would far into their future become Wyoming.
The misfortune of the small snakes has become a boon for paleontologists. New research published by a team from the University of Alberta has gained critical insight into the elusive history of prehistoric snakes.
“We’ve never had a good fossil record of these snakes,” said Michael Caldwell, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. “Here, we’ve got three really lovely specimens in one burrow, which gives us the information we need to investigate the origins and evolutionary history of an enigmatic group of living, burrowing snakes.”
White River Wyoming
The White River Formation is a layer of rock deposited during the Paleogene Period. Caldwell described it as a time of weird mammals and widespread volcanic activity in North America.
“The rocks of the White River Formation are 38 million years old, give or take a week or two,” he said. “It’s white because the sediments are heavily dominated by volcanic ash mixed with sand and fine-grained silt. Volcanic ash events were continual and caused several disasters.”
The fossils from the White River Formation are legendary. Large and small mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles are immaculately preserved in the ash-dominated rock.
“We find early dogs and cats, and saber-toothed relatives of cats that aren’t the same saber-tooths of the mammoth and mastodon,” Caldwell said. “Early bunny rabbits, all kinds of lizards, turtles, big-bodied mammals, early chameleons. The White River stuff is just amazing.”
There are legendary exposures of the White River Formation in Wyoming, particularly around Douglas. That’s where the University of Wyoming was excavating in 1976, when researchers found the three small snakes that are leaving a big impact.
Breithaupt’s Hibernating Snake
The fossilized snakes were collected with several other White River fossils during UW’s 1976 field project in Douglas. Aside from a 1997 paper written by paleontologist Brent Breithaupt, the UW Geological Museum’s collection manager at the time, the snakes haven’t garnered much attention until recently.
“I was talking with Brent, and he offered me the opportunity to work on the material in the early 2000s,” Caldwell said. “It took me a while to find a grad student to put on the project, and then it took us a while to get the paper written once she had graduated.”
That grad student, Jasmine Croghan, is the lead author of the paper describing the Wyoming White River snakes. The new species was called Hibernophis breithaupti, honoring Breithaupt and his original hypotheses about the unique discovery.
“Brent’s paper interpreted them as a hibernating assemblage of snakes,” Caldwell said. “That’s why we named them Hibernophis, the hibernating snake.”
A Den Of Beautiful Snakes
When describing a new species of prehistoric animal, the Holy Grail for paleontologists is a complete specimen.
Croghan, Caldwell and the other scientists studying the White River snakes had four of them, all nearly perfect skeletons to study, all collected near Douglas.
Snakes from the White River Formation aren’t well-known in the fossil record. Paleontologists have acquired most of their knowledge on their biology and evolutionary history from isolated fragments or individual bones.
“There are millions of isolated snake vertebrae in museum collections around the world, but very few articulated snakes,” he said. “As terrifying and robust as a snake might appear, they’re not held together very tightly. When they die, their bits and pieces wash about and they become disarticulated very easily.”
Caldwell said the three snakes found in the burrow, and a fourth specimen found nearby, are the most complete specimens of their kind ever found in the White River Formation.
“This particular trio of snakes are beautifully preserved,” he said. “We have almost everything in the anatomy of these little snakes, from the tips of their noses to the tips of their tails. They’re only missing the very tip of the tail, but everything else is there.”
Caldwell explained that “without going into the gory details about snake bony anatomy,” that Hibernophis is a kind of rubber boa, a smaller member of the boid family of snakes, which includes anacondas and boa constrictors.
While boids were and are widespread throughout the Americas, their evolutionary history remained an enigma until the discovery of Hibernophis. Wyoming’s White River snakes have provided critical insight into their evolutionary story.
Boid Behavior
While the anatomy and evolutionary significance of Hibernophis is exciting, the discovery revealed equally exciting information on the behavior of the 38-million-year-old snake. Caldwell said the preservation of three snakes in one burrow is significant.
“We have something that we never find in the fossil record,” he said. “Here we have three of these little rubber boas all curled up together in this ancient mammal burrow. One of them is substantially larger than the other two, so you can put on your natural history hat and start imagining what this could be.”
Whatever it was that drove the snakes into the burrow, which had been dug by a burrowing mammal, the snakes didn’t mind sharing the same space.
“We don’t know why they were there, but they were comfortable being together wherever they were,” he said. “Which means there is social behavior of snakes preserved in the fossil record.”
There’s a modern precedent for this behavior in snakes. Thousands of garter snakes in cold climates have been found living together in holes, entering a prolonged stupor while surviving from their collective body heat in what’s called a hibernaculum.
The three Hibernophis specimens may have perished in their hibernaculum, but more research would be needed to prove this. Regardless, Caldwell said the discovery is a rare and exciting instance of prehistoric behavior preserved in the fossil record.
“Most people think of reptiles as dim-witted, cold-blooded, not very social and with no maternal care,” he said. “The usual non-mammal analogies. Could this be a parent and a couple of young ones? Or is it possible that we’ve got a fright response and they’ve all ended up in a burrow together in the midst of a volcanic ash event? Or were they preparing for a cold weather season? We don’t know.”
Rediscovering Discoveries
The four specimens of Hibernophis breithaupti are in the collections of the UW Geological Museum. Caldwell and the other scientists briefly took the fossils to the University of Alberta for research and then to Austin, Texas, for a micro-CT scan.
“That’s how we found the third specimen,” he said. “It was inside the block and wasn’t clearly visible on the surface since it’s slightly below the other two.”
A major scientific discovery usually raises more questions than it answers. Thanks to the discovery of Hibernophis, Caldwell anticipates a flurry of scientific inquiries will be pursued.
“Every good answer just rattles a whole series of questions even harder,” he said. “Are there more specimens of Hibernophis? What would that have to say about the hypotheses that we’ve put forward in this recent publication? How does new material and new information change what we think we know about the interrelationships of these animals with all other birds and snakes, both fossil and living?
“You end up with more questions to ask from every answer that you put forward.”
For Caldwell, another major takeaway from the study of Hibernophis was its “rediscovery” in the collections of the UW Geological Museum. He believes more future paleontological discoveries will come from already-excavated fossils sitting on the dusty shelves of museums.
“There are hundreds, if not thousands, of specimens hiding away in museum collections that have never been examined,” he said. “The next places to go are out into the field and down into museum collections. Several places have good White River Formation collections. We need to see if there’s anything in those collections that’s been missed.”
Yesterday And Today
While these Hibernophis died in an ash-filled burrow 38 million years ago, their boid descendants survived into the present day. Rubber boas are everywhere in Wyoming, although they can be hard to find.
“These boas alive today are part of that same radiation as are these fossil ones,” he said. “They’re small-bodied night feeders that are rather secretive and spend a lot of time hiding in the sand, so very few people see them. They’re common in the pet trade if you’re into a rubber boa that stays buried in the sand in your terrarium all day, which I’m not.”
The anatomy and behavior of Wyoming’s modern-day boids might shed more insight into the world of their prehistoric ancestors preserved in the White River Formation. Hibernophis has established itself as another jewel in the ornate crown of Wyoming paleontological discoveries.
“With Hibernophis, we fill in a science gap and get some insights on prehistoric snake behavior,” Caldwell said. “It’s a great story and three really lovely specimens.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
Wyoming
From toothpaste to beer bottles to industrial batteries, the world relies on Wyoming’s ‘white gold’
By Dustin Bleizeffer
GREEN RIVER, Wyo. — After a four-minute elevator descent into the bowels of southwest Wyoming, dropping deep enough to bury the Empire State Building, a Tata Chemicals trona miner drove two Wyoming journalists in a truck 8.5 miles through catacombs, crossing under unaware motorists on Interstate 80 above, to where a crew was using an electric boring machine to chew into a wall of trona.
The visitors — briefed on safety protocols and equipped with underground attire and emergency devices — trudged through fresh mud bubbling with methane. Sections were added to a chartreuse inflatable tube that unrolled like a party favor and blew fresh air at the miners, who had just finished patching a small water line break.
Beams of light from hard hats swiveled and sparred in the tunnel as the earth moaned and machinery hummed. Soon, the machinery funneled a stream of sandwich-sized chunks of trona onto a fast-moving conveyor that would eventually deliver it to the surface to be processed into a fine, white powder and shipped around the world.
Have you ever brushed your teeth with toothpaste? Drank beer from a bottle or stared at the road through a car windshield? The white stuff — sodium carbonate (Na₂CO₃) to be precise — calms your heartburn and washes your socks. Check under your sink. Take a look in your bathroom cabinet. Many of those taken-for-granted products you use daily require an ingredient sourced from the depths of southwest Wyoming, and the sweat of underground miners.
Tata’s mine, along with its soda ash processing facilities at the surface, is among four such operations in Wyoming — all clustered in an area near the towns of Green River and Granger. Combined, they produce about 10 million tons of soda ash annually and feed 90% of the nation’s soda ash consumption. Wyoming producers make up more than 14% of the global market, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Soda ash, in fact, accounts for more than half of Wyoming’s global commodity exports with a whopping $1.3 billion worth of shipments annually, according to industry officials and state economists.
Wyoming coal can’t say that. Not even close.
Despite the industry’s global importance and massive operations, employing some 2,500 workers in the state, it plods along without much fanfare. Unless you live in the region, you might not even know about trona or its role in everyday life.
“If you’re in Cheyenne and you say ‘trona’ or ‘soda ash,’ a lot of people will say, ‘What’s that?’” said longtime Green River resident Stan Blake who served as House District 39 representative from 2007 to 2020. The business, perhaps, is guilty of being kind of boring, or simply void of political drama, Blake suggested. “It’s just been steady for years and years, so it doesn’t get talked about much.”
It was a mystery, even to many who began their careers in coal mining and wound up at this trona mine. “I wasn’t even aware of trona until I came to Wyoming,” said Mine Electrical Planner Kale Pitt. When asked about the significance of the industry, another Tata miner said, “Other than they make glass and soap out of it, that’s about all I know. It’s a good way to make a living, I guess.”
The miner turned his headlamp and went back to the business at hand.
He was spot on, in Blake’s estimation, who was never a trona miner himself. He spent more than 30 years on the rails and in train yards rather than chipping at trona in Wyoming’s subterranean, but he knows his Green River neighbors and notices toys in driveways.
“The level of lifestyle out here is higher, probably, than a lot of other places in the state,” Blake said. “It seems like everybody’s got a boat and they go out to Flaming Gorge and fish. And everybody — all the miners — like to hunt. The [trona] mines are really, really relevant here in Sweetwater County, that’s for sure.”
Perhaps less glorious than coal, less loud than oil, there are changes afoot in the trona industry with implications, both good and potentially not so good, for Wyoming.
Optimism and expansion
Baking soda and Range Rover windshields aside, Wyoming trona mine owners have been scrambling to meet new opportunities while bracing for headwinds.
On the opportune side, there’s wildly escalating demand for batteries and solar energy panels across the globe, according to industry reports. Though the business of toothpaste and baking soda doesn’t change much, global manufacturers are keen on ramping up production of energy components vital to meeting low-carbon initiatives. They can’t do it without more trona processed into soda ash. And Wyoming has a lot of trona — the largest known deposit in the world, according to industry and federal officials. Ninety percent of the world’s mineable, or “natural,” trona ore is right here in southwest Wyoming, they say.
“The world has an insatiable appetite for soda ash,” said Wyoming Tata’s Director of Governmental Affairs Jon Conrad, also a former Wyoming legislator. By Conrad’s estimation, the industry in Wyoming aims to expand — perhaps even double production in the next eight or so years.
In addition to Tata’s plans to crank out more soda ash while trimming its cost of production, neighboring producer WE Soda — with a larger operation than Tata’s — has launched a multi-billion-dollar expansion that’s crossing permitting milestones. A big part of that effort, “Project West,” will include “solution” mining, or pumping water into the trona deposits to flush the material to the surface rather than sending legions of boat-owning miners underground, according to the company.
Federal regulators also recently advanced permitting for a potential fifth trona operation in the region — Pacific Soda’s proposed Dry Creek Trona Mine project, which would also pull trona via water injection-and-return wells. The operation would create an estimated additional 300 full-time jobs in the region, according to the company.
All of that optimism and investment, however, might stand a little broadside to some shifting market and political winds.
Shifting markets
Wyoming’s trona industry has, for decades, won an advantage for producing “natural” soda ash. It’s pretty simple: mine the rocks, crush them, dissolve and dehydrate the mineral and ship it to customers. But for the past couple of decades, China and Turkey have ramped up production of synthetic soda ash — a product derived from flushing sodium carbonate-containing material from more prevalent, less pure deposits.
Synthetic soda ash threatens to beat out natural soda ash on price, according to industry officials. Though Wyoming producers claim their product is superior for both its quality and lower-carbon footprint, natural soda ash producers must find efficiencies to lower their cost of production.
Solution mining is one major cost-efficiency strategy, according to Conrad. Another is finding alternatives to expensive electrical power and other forms of energy.
Mining trona and processing it into soda ash requires a lot of electricity — about a continuous 32 megawatts at Tata Chemicals, according to the company. One megawatt is enough electricity to power about 750 homes. Tata produces about 90% of its own electricity, via coal and natural gas burners, which also generate steam used in the refining process. But the operation relies on utility provider Rocky Mountain Power for the rest of its electricity needs, and those costs keep climbing. Tata wants to reduce or eliminate its reliance on Rocky Mountain Power by incorporating nuclear energy.
Last year, the company inked a letter of intent with BWXT Advanced Technologies to install up to eight nuclear microreactors on site, boosting Tata’s self-produced electrical power to about 40 megawatts — enough to meet expansion plans without increasing its reliance on Rocky Mountain Power. “The microreactors offer a carbon-free, reliable source of energy that can support [Tata Chemicals’] operations and contribute to the state’s energy portfolio,” the company said in a prepared statement.
But even the industry’s best-laid plans to increase its competitive edge could be derailed by politics. President Donald Trump’s tariff wars take particular aim at China, which accounts for about 10% of Wyoming soda ash sales. If the country retaliates with its own tariffs, it could be a major blow to the industry, according to University of Wyoming Associate Professor of Economics Rob Godby. It might even dampen the industry’s plans to expand operations.
“That could be a really significant impact on our [soda ash] exports,” Godby said.
Back underground, Mine Production Supervisor Eric Castillon proudly described a continual process of increasing production efficiencies in a never-ending effort to sustain the company’s competitive edge.
“This is the trona capital of the world,” Castillon said over the hum of a mobile conveyor carrying rock to the surface. “I can see this mine going for another 50 to 100 years. Trona’s not going anywhere, as long as there’s a need for it.”
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
Related
WYOMING, Minn. (FOX 9) – Interstate 35 in Wyoming had to be shut down for nearly two hours Friday afternoon after a four-vehicle crash involving two vehicles and two trucks with trailers, one hauling horses and dogs.
What happened
The backstory:
The Minnesota State Patrol responded to the crash at about 3:50 p.m. on northbound Interstate 35 near the Wyoming exit. When authorities arrived, they determined an unknown vehicle cut in front of traffic, causing a rear-end chain reaction style crash.
Authorities say a passenger vehicle was hit by a truck with a trailer, which was hit by another truck with a horse trailer. Another passenger car was involved in the crash.
The State Patrol says the horse trailer was carrying four to five horses, and three dogs, none of which was injured in the crash.
Horses on the loose?
What we know:
The Chisago County Sheriff’s Office posted on its Facebook they believe the horses were loose in the immediate aftermath of the crash, creating more chaos on the interstate during the afternoon rush hour. They were eventually gathered.
One hospitalized
The State Patrol says one driver was hospitalized with minor, non-life threatening injuries.
Northbound Interstate 35 was closed from 3:50 p.m. to 5:40 p.m.
The Source: Information was provided by the Minnesota State Patrol.
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