A FRESH AIR TRIP TO THE KANSAS CHALK BEDS

 

You can't change who you are, but you can change what you have in your head, you can refresh what you're thinking about, you can put some fresh air in your brain. Ernesto Bertarelli

The sun was peering over the horizon, and through the windshield, as I scurried across the High Plains at sunrise.

I was able to take a small break from my self-quarantine on Saturday with a quick one-day field excursion to the Cretaceous chalk beds of western Kansas.  I found out that the Wichita  Gem and Mineral Society (WG&MS) was taking a field trip to western Kansas and that a former student of mine was leading the trip.  In fact, Jerry was a one of my early students graduating in 1972 from Fort Hays State two years after I had arrived.  I had not seen the lad since that date but had been in recent email contact.  I decided that Colorado Springs was closer to the chalk beds than Wichita so decided to tag along and get some fresh air.  As a former teacher I could not help but add a few comments at the outcrops.

A group of 15 or so fossil pickers met in Oakley, Kansas, (north of the chalk beds) at 10:00 am.  Unfortunately, my brain was a tad slow on that day and I sort of forgot my Mountain Daylight Time was an hour behind the Oakley Central Daylight time; therefore, no roadside stops for breakfast and coffee!  But, off we went at 10:15 heading south to outcrops along the Smoky Hill River.  Mostly we were driving on wind-blown loess (essentially dust) of Pleistocene age; however, ~250 feet of the Neogene Ogallala Formation/Group (sands, silts, etc.) forming the famous Ogallala Aquifer was not far below the surface.

The High Plains are in a severe drought and dust (much reworked loess) is on every country road.

The chalk beds are the eroded remnants of the Smoky Hill Chalk Member of the Niobrara Formation of Late Cretaceous age, about 82-87 Ma.  The chalk that forms the bulk of the Member formed in a vast inland epeiric sea that stretched from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. In the mid to late Cretaceous this sea, known by geologists as the Western Interior Seaway (WIS), split North America into three major subcontinents.  In the United States the western boundary was the tectonic zone associated with various mountain building events generated by the Farallon Oceanic Plate being overridden and subducting under the North American Plate. Large amounts of coarse- to fine- sediment was eroded into the inland sea, To the east lay the remnants of former tectonic zones that created the Appalachian Mountains and their precursors.  The land east of the seaway was non mountainous and did not contribute large amounts of sediment to the WIS although coastal and deltaic sediments are known.

The Western Interior Seaway during much of the Late Cretaceous. Map courtesy of the USGS and W. A. Cobban and R. C. McKinney.

Tectonic plate interactions in the western U.S during the time of the WIS. Sketch courtesy of the National Science Foundation and  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Cooler waters from the Arctic ocean were the first to invade the U.S. and came to a standstill in the earliest part of the late Cretaceous (perhaps the latest part of the early Cretaceous) and is known as the Mowry sea.  These waters carried a cool water fauna rich in Inoceramid bivalves. The warmer water from the Gulf of Mexico carried a much different fauna (a tropical fauna with different bivalves) but also transgressed  across the Continent and finally met the cooler arctic water in the early part of the late Cretaceous.  Central and western Kansas was situated in the deepest part of the WIS (~2500 feet) and has a nice fossiliferous section of lime rocks in the Greenhorn, Carlile, and Niobrara formations.

The Paleogeographic Map of the Early Cretaceous ~125 Ma, compiled by Ron Blakey at Colorado Plateau Geosystems, shows the Arctic and tropical waters still struggling to meet up and complete the Western Interior Seaway. 

Our field excursion was to hunt for fossils in the upper part of the Niobrara carbonate rocks in the Smoky Hill Chalk.  These rocks are often covered by the Late Cretaceous Pierre Shale, a black shale that represents a shallower water deposition and can be observed to the west of Oakley at McAllister Buttes near old Fort Wallace.  Although the Pierre has a spectacular fauna of coiled and straight cephalopods in many states,  outcrops in Kansas are tough to locate and prospect. The late Cenozoic Ogallala Formation or Group, overlying the Pierre and/or Niobrara, crops out around the area and represents sediments eroded off the rising Rocky Mountains to the west and which originally covered Kansas east to the Flint Hills. Today the eastern edge of the Ogallala has eroded westward (and is still eroding) so that it now covers perhaps 25% of the State and defines the High Plains Physiographic Province, ~ Hays west.  However, eastward flowing streams such as the Arkansas, Smoky Hill, Saline, Solomon, and Republican Rivers have carved through the Ogallala and exposed rocks of the Niobrara Formation and technically these exposures along the rivers are park of the Smoky Hills.  This is where the crew was heading—off the High Plains at Oakley south to the exposures in the chalk beds along the Smoky Hill River (big finger heading west).

Map courtesy of Kansas Geological Survey.

OK bone pickers, here are some prime chalk beds!

The yellow and gray colors of the chalk are due to weathering profiles.  Photos courtesy of Aaron and his drone.

Kansas is almost devoid of public lands where bone diggers can prospect; however, the Wichita club has a member who had permission from a landowner to collect fossils.  The Smoky Hill Chalk does not have a bountiful number of invertebrate fossils available for collecting.  There are only two common inoceramid clams and sparse coiled and straight shelled cephalopods and they do not have the shiny nacre on the outside of their shells that would make them attractive.  It seems as if acid water dissolved the aragonite (a carbonate minerals) that formed the nacre.  In addition, the most common fossils are: 1) a large (up to 3-5 feet), very thin shelled (quarter of a inch) inoceramid clam named Platyceramus; and 2) a dime size oyster named Pseudoperna.  The clam needs lots of careful attention and plaster to extract from the rocks while the oyster is one of those fossils where your collection only needs a half dozen or fewer.  It seems as if the big Platyceramus sort of floated on the oozy muddy bottom while the only attachment for the oysters was on the clam shell.  Outcrops have thousands of broken pieces of Platyceramus covered with Pseudoperna weathering out of the rocks.

A ”breaking up” Platyceramus covered with attached Pseudoperna (by head of hammer).

Pseudoperna congesta attached to an inoceramid shell.  Photo courtesy of the National Science Foundation and Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

But fossil prospectors do not come looking in the chalk beds for clams and oysters—they are after the big boys and girls, the marine vertebrates such as mosasaurs, bony fish, flying reptiles, sharks, and plesiosaurs.  The most common large vertebrate fossil in the Chalk is the bony fish known as Xiphactinus (formally known as Portheus when I was in school).  These massive fish reached a length of ~17 feet and the most famous specimen (~13 feet long) was collected by George Sternberg in Gove County and contained a “recently swallowed” 6-foot-long fish named Gillicus. The field trip crew found several portions of fish vertebrae, probably of Xiphactinus, and those certainly caused some excitement.  I found several large scales in splitting chalk layers that I can only presume came from this model.

This skull of Xiphactinus in my collection is a cast.  The original was found a few decades ago and now resides in a museum.

Sharks of various sizes are also represented in the Chalk Beds but almost always by teeth.  The cartilaginous skeletons of sharks are rarely preserved.  The most common sharks in the Chalk are Cretoxyrhina, Cretalamna, and Squalicorax.  However, shell crushing teeth of the shark Ptychodus are occasionally found. During the collecting trip on Saturday I only saw a couple of Cretoxyrhina teeth that were picked up from the surface by the group.

   

 

Squalicorax, Cretoxyrhina, Cretalamna: photos courtesy of Mike Everhart & Oceans of Kansas. A tooth from Ptychotus, a shell crushing shark.

Although hundreds of the extinct reptilian fossils known as mosasaurs (often thought of, although wrongly, as marine lizards)  have been collected from the chalk, their remains still seem relatively rare for amateur collectors.  Over the years while at Fort Hays I and our students found only a few scattered remains of the beasts, mostly isolated teeth, and vertebrae.  None were collected on Saturday.

There are other rarer invertebrates and vertebrates in the Chalk that rockhounds usually do not observe when casually looking for specimens.  But fossils of flying reptiles such as the famous pterosaurs, long necked plesiosaurs such as Elasmosaurs, belemnites (squid-like pens), straight- and coiled-ammonite cephalopods, sparse birds, a few floating crinoids, some barnacles, a few dinosaurs that probably floated into deeper water from the shoreline (bloat and float), and the really strange clams called Rudists that resemble horn corals. However, many rockhounds do not realize that the chalk is composed, almost entirely, of microscopic, compacted, carbonate plates derived from single celled algae.  These plates are termed coccolithophores or coccoliths for short.  The algae lived in near surface waters and upon perishing fell to the bottom by the gazillions and formed an oozy calcareous mud that ultimately hardened into chalk.

An interesting  aspect of the Smoky Hill Chalk is that portions of it are silicified and known as Niobrarite or Smoky Hill Jasper. The silica percolated down from volcanic ash deposited in the overlying Ogallala Formation/Group.  The silicified chalk was often used by Native Americans on the Great Plains to construct projectile points and scrapers.

Silicified chalk from the Smoky Hill Chalk Member found in a Trego County gravel terrace deposit.

The Niobrara Formation represents a fascinating part of Cretaceous history.  As formations go it is not of tremendous length, perhaps around 5 million years from 87 Ma to 82 Ma, but it plays a critical part in our understanding of the Late Cretaceous rocks deposited in the WIS.  In rockhound terms, the WIS rocks represent a series of transgressions and regressions of marine waters probably caused by rapid seafloor spreading (due to the Mid-Cretaceous Superplume of hot molten rock) far to the west.  These fluctuations of marine waters in Kansas are somewhat minor compared to the major marine cycle (Zuni Sequence) that allowed water to occupy (transgression) and depart (regression) the WIS. The Zuni Sequence started in the Late Jurassic and lasted until the early Paleocene (Tertiary). Erle Kauffman, one of the most noted paleontologist/stratigraphers working in the Cretaceous, identified 10 worldwide Cretaceous cycles (T/R) in the Zuni Sequence of which the T/R 5-9 are present in Kansas.  Kauffman estimated the earliest of the marine transgressions (T5) in Kansas started ~ 108 Ma with the warm water Kiowa Formation representing a marine transgression from the south; however, the Kiowa is restricted in its occurrence in Kansas.  Better known is the overlying T/R 6 (~100 Ma to 88 Ma) composed of the Dakota Formation/Group representing shoreline and nearshore sedimentation followed by the further offshore Graneros Formation.  Above the Graneros are the deep-water lime rocks of the Greenhorn and lower Carlile formations. The T/R7 (~88 Ma to 78 Ma) is composed of the upper Carlile, the Niobrara Formation (with maximum transgression in the Fort Hays Member) and regression in the lower part of the Pierre Shale. T/R cycles 8-10 are not exposed in Kansas as the WIS split into two bodies of water (north and south of central South Dakota) with the Kansas waters retreating south back into the Gulf of Mexico.  In the latest Cretaceous the WIS was reaching the end of its “life” as the early uplift of the Rocky Mountains was playing havoc with the inland sea.  The last remnants of the WIS persisted until the Paleocene in parts of South Dakota, North Dakota, and adjacent Saskatchewan.  The seas  of the Zuni Sequence represent the last marine waters to cover the craton of North America.

Jerry’s best find—a string of fish vertebrae.

I wish to thank Jerry and the WG&MS for leading and sponsoring this breath of fresh air and the chance to collect a few fossils.  I was unable to stay past mid-afternoon; however, it appears the group was successful and located several partial fish skeletons.  Sunday was a cold windy day and most Cretaceous rocks were seen from inside of the vehicle.

The best way to get a good group photo of a bunch of bone pickers is from Aaron’s drone.

I would encourage fossil pickers interested in Cretaceous rocks of the WIS to purchase (on-line book dealers) a copy of: Kauffman, Erle G., 1977, Cretaceous facies, faunas, and paleoenvironments across the Western Interior Basin: The Mountain Geologist, vol. 14, nos. 3 and 4. This journal is a publication of the Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists, Denver.

ARTINITE CRYSTALS SPICE UP A QUARANTINE DAY

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.  Albert Einstein

Here it is again--another day of self quarantine at the local ranch.  I should not complain since my family and friends are well and safe, but....... My adopted state of Wisconsin is going crazy with Covid-19 and friends tell me the hospitals are full and ICUs overflowing.  The Governor and Legislature continue to fight.  The Black Hills state of South Dakota has the highest rate of Covid-19 per capita in the U.S.  I remain concerned about friends in each state.  Here in Colorado the number of infected persons is increasing; however, nothing on the order of Wisconsin.  As desert, I am very tired of politics and can't wait until the election is over.  But, by January 1st campaigning will begin for the mid year congressional elections!  Yep, you guessed it--I am an old curmudgeon.

We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon. Franklin D. Roosevelt

In my last Posting I noted that desautelsite was collected from the Artinite Pit in San Benito, County, California, where artinite is a major mineral found in the excavation.  The locality is part of the New Idria Mining District located in the Diablo Range (part of the California Coast Ranges). The District contains mercury-, chromium- and magnesium-rich rocks associated with a large intrusive body of serpentine.  The mercury mines (mostly cinnabar ore) reached their heyday during the massive gold mining in California, AKA California Gold Rush, as mercury was used to extract the gold from the ore.  Mercury is mixed with crushed gold bearing rocks, or placer sands, and the gold will dissolve into an amalgam.  The mixture is then heated driving off the mercury vapors leaving behind fairly pure gold.  Of course, the mercury vapors got into the air, soil, water, and living organisms creating numerous environmental problems.  The use of mercury did not stop until the 1960s but fish in some streams, such as the Sacramento River, still carry elevated levels of mercury.     

Today the Mining District is best known for the gemstones (benitoite is the State Gem) produced at localities like the Dallas Gem Mine and the Benitoite Mine. Numerous other mines and claims are operated as specimen mines yielding a variety of minerals from garnets to serpentine (the State Rock) to gold to artinite to neptunite and others.  The District is the Type Locality to at least 15 minerals.

In my small collection I have four specimens of artinite {Mg₂(CO₃)(OH)₂-3H₂O)] purchased at various times over the years.  All were collected at the Artinite Pit.  This excavation is associated with the New Idria serpentine body where the secondary minerals, such as artinite, are located in fractures and cracks as the result of low temperature metamorphism of serpentinized ultrabasic rocks from the Earth’s mantle.

Crust of artinite botryoids on serpentine matrix. Width FOV ~8.9 cm. 

Masses of acicular crystals from specimen shown above.  Width FOV ~7 mm.

Mass of artinite silky fibers.  Width FOV ~7 mm.

This large botryoid of acicular is attached to the same specimen as desautelsite described in the previous post.  Width FOV ~7 mm.

Spray of acicular crystals.  Width FOV ~7 mm.

Although artinite is a colorless or white mineral it is actually quite spectacular when viewed under magnification as the individual crystals are acicular and usually form spherical aggregates of radiating individuals.  Others may form botryoidal clusters of silky fibers. The crystals are quite soft at ~2.0-2.5 (Mohs), have a silky to sub vitreous luster, and are transparent.  The crystals are quite brittle, and specimens must be handled with care.  Their morphology, and association with serpentine allows for identification. 

Mt. Bierstadt 14,065 feet. Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.  Hope is the dream of a waking man.   Pliny the Elder

DESAUTELESITE AND ZOOMING WITH THE MICROMOUNT SYMPOSIUM

 I had a new mineral experience today (October 10). No, not an estate sale, backyard sale, or field trip but a mineral symposium via Zoom™. Now Zoom is the new wonderkid on the block that virtually no rockhound was familiar with 10 months ago.  Now churches are holding Zoom meetings, schoolkids are attending classes via Zoom, and many businesses are essentially operating via Zoom.  Zooming is now a verb and I assume Zoom will be the word of the year (or perhaps Covid or Coronavirus).  I did insert a trademark sign ™ after my first use of the word since I presume it is propriety; however, its use these days is similar to xerox (a verb used to indicate any photocopying) or coke (a noun to indicate any soft drink). At any rate, I attended a Zoom meeting—the Desautels Micromount Symposium.

I had known about the Symposium for years, mostly from reading Quintin Wright’s yearly review, “Through the Scope: The Year in Micromounting” published each year in Rocks and Minerals.  However, the Symposium is sponsored by the Baltimore Mineral Society and Maryland is a fair distance from Colorado Springs, so the Zoom meeting was a blessing in disguise, at least for me. The regular attendees were “OK with the format considering the Covid situation” but were missing the camaraderie, the specimen trading, and especially the give-away tables.  I certainly was an outsider, but no one could recognize me since my new webcam could not, or would not, (blame it on the electronics) post my video photo online! So, I was just Michael on the screen.  However, they are a friendly bunch and certainly would have welcomed me if I would have appeared 😊

The Baltimore Mineral Society was established in 1951 (CSMS dates to 1936) and is a member of both the Eastern Federation and the American Federation.  This year the Micromount Symposium celebrated its 64^th annual event (if I count correctly) and this was the first Zoom event! The official name is the Desautels Micromount Symposium named for Paul Desautels, a famed micromounter.  I am uncertain when that moniker was applied to the Symposium.

The Bibliographic section of the Mineralogical Record website (mineralogicalrecord.com) has a very inclusive biography of Desautels and a few points are extracted below. Desautels (1920-1991) held many professional positions in his career but perhaps is best known for his 25 years spent as Curator of Gems and Minerals in the Department of Mineral Sciences in the U.S. National Museum of Natural History, AKA Smithsonian Institution. In fact, he was “the most influential curator of the 20^th century.” Desautels was awarded the Carnegie Mineralogical Award for his mineralogical contributions, the Smithsonian Director’s Medal, and the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show created an annual award for “mineral collecting connoisseurship” named the Desautels Trophy.

The Micromounters Hall of Fame was established by the Baltimore Mineral Society to honor those who have supported and promoted micromounting.  In the early years, the Society honored “modern awardees” and a few “old timer awardees.”  In 1981, the initial year, Paul Desautels was inducted along with “old timers” George Fiss (d. 1925) and George Rakestraw (d. 1904). In examining the Hall of Fame recipients I noted the names of Lazard Cahn, 1982, the Honorary President for Life of CSMS, Arthur Roe, 1993, a founding member of CSMS who studied under Cahn, Jim Hurlbut, 2011, from the Denver area and a force in the Rocky Mountain Federation, Shorty Withers, 1995, the Honorary Curator of Micromounts at the Denver Museum of Science, Arnold Hampson, 2012, of Cortez who donated his micromount collection to the Colorado School of Mines, and Carolyn and Steve Weinberger, 2014.  For years Carolyn served as the Editor of the American Federation Newsletter and was a tremendous help during my year of writing land conservation articles for the Newsletter. Steve served as the Central Office of the Federation.

At the recent meeting two gentlemen were inducted into the Micromounters Hall of Fame: Michael Seeds, an astronomer at Franklin and Marshall College, and Renado Pagano, a collector from Milano?, Italy.  Dr. Seeds is a well known astronomer with numerous publications who entered mineral collecting later in life (he was not a career mineralogist). Pagono is an industrialist, and in conjunction with his spouse, have amassed a systematic and aesthetic collection of over 13,000 minerals.  Both presented the key talks at the Symposium, Seeds on the relationship of minerals and “stars,” and Pagano on sulfur in Sicily.  I learned much from both including Pagano’s note that mineral collectors often collect other items (see my last Post, October 7, 2020).

Bright orange desautelsite crystals scattered on serpentine matrix with bright white artinite.  I am uncertain about the different crystals on the left third of the photomicrograph.  Perhaps they are dehydrated desautelsite, or a different mineral. Width FOV ~6 mm.

  

A druse of nice, bright orange crystals of desautelsite.  Width FOV ~4 mm.

In 1979 the carbonate mineral desautelsite [Mg₆Mn₂(OH)₁₆[CO₃]-4H₂O] was named to honor Paul Desautels.  It is a rare, bright orange mineral associated with fractures and cracks in rocks called serpentinite.  These metamorphic rocks are composed of one or more mineral members of the Serpentine Group, magnesium silicates formed by hydration and metamorphism of mantle rocks along boundaries of tectonic plates.  Several other secondary magnesium minerals are usually associated with desautelsite, including artinite [Mg₂(CO₃)(OH)₂-3H₂O)], and hydromagnesite [(Mg₅(CO₃)₄(OH)₂-4H₂O] although desautelsite is the last mineral to form in the fractures.

Desautelsite is a very soft mineral (2 on Mohs) with translucent pseudo- hexagonal crystals forming an orange, druse-like, scaly crust.  Without a powerful microscope the individual crystals are exceedingly difficult to observe.

The type locality for desautelsite is in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and is associated with serpentinites. However, it is best known from two sites in California, especially the Artinite Pit in San Benito County. MinDat notes that at this locality an open cut of serpentinized rocks are exposed.  Secondary minerals like desautelsite grow on the altered surfaces of the spaces between the breccia blocks.  Other than these localities in Pennsylvania and California there is one locality in Maryland, and three in Japan, where the mineral occurs with other ultramafic rocks.  So, it is a rare mineral.

BTW, I missed out again.  On the NASDAQ Board Zoom Video Communications was trading at ~$62 on November 1, 2019 and ~$492 on October 9, 2020!  I also missed out on Apple! And Microsoft!

I think the one thing about the Zoom calls is unlike being in a room with people where you can look away or drift off, I feel like with Zoom, everyone's face is just dead center, head on, there is no drifting. It takes a lot of energy from me.            Mellody Hopson

WOW DINOSAURS AND THE UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE

 

All of science can be divided into physics and stamp-collecting.    Lord Kelvin

I am not a philatelist, a serious stamp collector, but as a kid I collected stamps as a fun hobby (along with coins, minerals, bird feathers,and numerous other objects).  A philatelist is a person like Art Ackley who bought his first stamp album when he was 8 and collected until his death (2019) at 95.  He also sold rocks and minerals at his shop on Stone Street in Colorado Springs for 45 years (see Posting May 24, 2020).  I collected stamps because of their geographic connotation and always had an atlas around to locate countries that produced the stamps—I learned much. In retrospect, I note that many of my stamps came from countries that were colonial in nature and governed by European rulers, for example French Equatorial Africa.  Today these colonies have different names as French Equatorial Africa is now the countries of Chad, the Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo, and Gabon.  I suppose that rockhounds collecting stamps is not unusual and at one time the American Federation of Mineralogical Societies had a Commemorative Stamp Committee to encourage the publication of mineral-themed stamps by the USPS.

 

 The Kingdom of Yugoslavia (Kraljevina Jugoslavija) was established in 1929 and lasted until World War II when it was replaced by the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Socijalistička Federativna Republika Jugoslavija).  The breakup of the Republic started in 2003 and by 2006 Yugoslavia did not exist and was divided into 6 different countries: Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, North Macedonia, and Slovenia. I collected these stamps in the1950s.   

 

I had numerous, several pages, of German stamps in my collection.  I suspect they were printed pre1945 since Adolph Hitler is on one stamp (left side, fourth row). 

In 2019 the USPS produced a T.rex (Tyrannosaurus rex) series of four different stamps best sold in panes of 16.  These are beautiful, large, glossy, colored stamps showing different poses of the mighty dinosaur: 1) A face-to-face encounter with a T. rex approaching through a forest clearing; 2) a newly hatched T. rex covered with downy feathers; 3) a juvenile T. rex pursuing a primitive mammal; and 4) young adult T. rex with a young Triceratops. “The Nation’s T. rex,” the young adult depicted on two of the stamps, was discovered on federal land in Montana and is one of the most studied and important specimens ever found. Its remains are now exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Art director Greg Breeding designed the stamps with original artwork by scientist and paleoartist Julius T. Csotonyi (info from USPS).

The T.rex stamps have a lenticular component on two stamps that simulates motion. Several images are divided into thin, alternating parallel lines and overlaid with a transparent ridged plastic that alters a viewer’s perception of the scene when the stamp is rotated slightly—sort of like a hologram.  One animated stamp stimulates a face-to-face encounter with a charging T. rex. A second stamp shows a young adult and a juvenile Triceratops in both fleshed out and fossil forms.  You really need to buy at least four stamps to observe this neat effect.

The T.rex stamp set is the latest U.S. issue to celebrate prehistoric animals and fossils. The first U.S. issue was the 6¢ Age of Reptiles stamp, part of the 1970 Natural History pane of four (Bald Eagle, African Elephant, Haida Ceremonial Canoe, Apatosaurus in the swamp) issued to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.  The second was the wildly popular 1997 pane of 15 Jurassic and Cretaceous dinosaur 32¢ stamps.  Paleoartist James Gurney painted the original dinosaur panoramas for the panes: 1) A scene in Montana, 75 million years ago; and 2) A scene in Colorado, 150 million years ago. My framed pane was a Christmas present 23 years ago. A 33¢ T. rex stamp was issued in 2000 to celebrate the movie Jurassic Park.  And now in 2019, the innovative T.rex pane.  Thank you, United States Postal Service. 

 

Notice the following T.rex stamps on left side and in the middle--there are two different views.  Pane courtesy of the USPS.

I've been standin' here waitin' Ms Postperson

So patiently, for just a card, or just a letter

        As sort of crooned by the Marvelettes