24 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1942 



Geology. — Field trips to the West for vertebrate and invertebrate 

 paleontological collections were specially successful this year. 



Dr. C. E. Eesser, curator of invertebrate paleontology spent part 

 of the summer in Montana, and part in the Canadian Rockies. Ac- 

 companied by George Burke Maxey, of Missoula, Mont., he first made 

 a brief collecting trip to the northern Wasatch Mountains in search 

 of Cambrian fossils. In the Canadian Rockies they devoted the first 

 2 weeks to the study of Cambrian beds in the mountains adjacent to 

 the Bow Valley, chiefly at Castle Mountain, and in the Valley of the 

 Ten Peaks at Moraine Lake, where they found excellent fossils high 

 on nearby Eiffel Peak. They worked for more than a month from 

 a base camp at the foot of Mount Stephen, 3 miles west of Field, 

 covering an area as far east as Lake Louise and west beyond Emerald 

 Lake. For nearly three-quarters of a century the fossil bed on 

 Mount Stephen has been known to paleontologists throughout the 

 world. The trail leading up from Field is only 3 miles long, but it 

 climbs 2,700 feet. Entire trilobites are common, and many other 

 fossils are obtainable. With the permission of the Canadian Na- 

 tional Park Service, Dr. Resser and his party collected excellent ma- 

 terial. Later it was Dr. Resser's privilege to follow the trail on the 

 north side of the Kicking Horse River to Burgess Pass, made famous 

 by Dr. C. D. Walcott, former Secretary of the Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion, by his discovery of the most remarkable fauna of these earliest 

 geological periods yet found. 



Dr. G. Arthur Cooper, associate curator of vertebrate paleontology, 

 collected fossils in Texas and Oklahoma. In Fort Worth he met 

 Dr. N. D. Newell, and for 3 days, together with Dr. Ralph H. King, 

 of the Kansas Geological Survey, they collected in north-central 

 Texas, proceeding from there to Marathon, Tex., where they spent a 

 month collecting Permian limestone blocks containing silicified fos- 

 sils. In late July Dr. Cooper met Mrs. J. H. Renfro and her daugh- 

 ter at Fort Worth for investigations of the Pennsylvanian rocks of 

 Jack County and the Cretaceous rocks around Fort Worth, where 

 they obtained many interesting fossils. In August Dr. Cooper col- 

 lected Devonian and Ordovician fossils at Ardmore, Okla., and then 

 continued to Ada, Okla., where he was joined by Dr. C. Lalicker, of 

 the University of Oldahoma, who guided him to numerous localities 

 where free Pennsylvanian fossils are obtainable. At Muskogee he 

 made a fine collection of Mississippian fossils, and from there made a 

 short trip into southern Kansas to collect Pennsylvanian fossils. This 

 is the third season that Dr. Cooper has collected in these fields, and with 

 the 4 tons of blocks containing silicified fossils collected in the Glass 

 Mountains, and many thousand specimens of free Pennsylvanian 

 fossils obtained this year in north-central Texas and Oklahoma, the 



