ASU Research E-Magazine: Intellectual Resources

The members of the Southwest Paleontological Society are accustomed to finding rare fossils during field trips and expeditions taken under the flag of the Mesa Southwest Museum. But when they discovered paleobotanist Kathleen Pigg at ASU, they had encountered a rare intellectual resource as well.

There are probably about 300 active paleobotanists in the United States, not counting those who study pollen. She is the one of the few in Arizona.

The society now counts nearly 300 dues-paying members. Almost all of them are amateur paleontologists. Before Pigg came along, few of them knew much about fossil plants. Now, club members are eager to join Pigg in her fossil-plant research endeavors, the dinosaur frenzy spawned by Jurassic Park notwithstanding.

“She really has been helpful in contributing to our club,” says Brian McClelland, who doubles as the society’s president and associate curator of the museum. “We can assist her and in turn she can lend us her expertise. I’m really thrilled to have her help because there aren’t any people in our club with her background.”

Pigg’s collaborations with the society began in the fall of 1992, when she became one of its first guest speakers. The next month she led the group on a field trip to a fossil-plant site near Payson.

Since then, she has held a couple of fossil-plant workshops in her laboratory for the society’s members. In November 1993, Pigg presented a paper at the museum’s first “Fossils of Arizona” symposium. She was also coauthor of another paper presented by the society’s Buck Tegowski. Pigg commended the symposium as an exceptional job in bringing together interested professional and lay people to discuss topics of regional paleontological interest.

“There has always been a strong interaction between professional paleobotanists and amateurs who are interested in fossils,” she says. “Tremendous collections have been amassed and important discoveries have been made by amateurs, some of who become quite actively involved in research.”

Pigg is not the society’s only significant connection to ASU. McClelland graduated from ASU at about the time that Pigg arrived as a faculty member. Also a graduate of Pennsylvania State University, McClelland earned a second bachelor’s degree—in geology—from ASU in 1988.

He was graduated with a master’s degree from Texas Tech, where he conducted research on the skull of Allosaurus, an earlier cousin of the famous Tyrannosaurus rex.

He currently is analyzing a set of tracks from northern Arizona, possibly left by a mammal-like reptile during the Triassic Period about 200 million years ago. The tracks are on extended loan to the museum.

“They may be really significant,” McClelland says, because scientists know of only one other set of mammal-like reptile tracks from North America.

Under McClelland’s leadership but with a great deal of help from a hard core group of volunteers, the society has burgeoned from 40 to 280 members in a little over a year. The film Jurassic Park probably didn’t hurt recruiting, either.

“I think people have a fascination with the geological past, that past plants and animals and environments could be so different from how they are today,” Pigg says.

“Although the history of plants is a more subtle interest than that of dinosaurs, it is the plants that make up the environment. Public interest in both should be encouraged.”—Steve Koppes