About Us

Who We Are

In 2009, John and A-Lan Reynolds stumbled upon the wild beauty of Catron County, New Mexico while on a road trip to the Four Corners area with their daughter and son-in-law. John (1) saw exceptional night skies for astronomy. A-Lan (2) saw unspoiled, endless expanses of America as it might have looked before there were people. They began stitching together parcels of this beautiful land, immediately roping their close friend Howard “Pip” Pope (3) into their quest to explore every corner of their rapidly growing piece of heaven.

1. B.S. Astrophysics, Indiana University and M.A. Geophysics, Indiana University
2. B.S., M.S. Geophysics, Stanford University; M.S. EE, University of Texas at Austin
3. B.S. Mathematics, Westchester University, Former Air Force fighter pilot

At first The Three Amigos camped in tents down in a meadow. Then they put in a road to the top of the mountain, and all manner of creative wilderness accommodations ensued. The land is magical. The night sky is jaw dropping, as promised – one can almost read by the light of the Milky Way. The elk are so big they seem to be left over from the Pleistocene. But the geology is completely unexpected: fossils are abundant everywhere on the property, some of them are huge. When they figured out the rocks were Late Cretaceous age (84 – 88 million years old), they got dinosaur fever! (No, they haven’t found one – YET).

Geological Setting

The Reynolds land is a spectacular exposure of coastal plain deposits that were laid down 84 – 89 million years ago on the western margin of the Western Interior Seaway, which divided the North American continent at that time. The topography consists of mesas and deep ravines, exposing layers of the Crevasse Canyon Formation, whose age straddles the Coniacian-Santonian boundary within the Late Cretaceous epoch. A broad range of coastal sedimentary layers is stacked in the ravine and canyon walls by virtue of periodic oscillations of the ancient shoreline. Near-shore distal delta, beach, lagoon, forest, terrestrial stream and deltaic riverine plain deposits are readily accessed for study. Over time, the coastline slowly retreated and terrestrial deposits began to dominate, providing many educational opportunities for field methods in sedimentology and stratigraphy.

Plentiful Coniacian-Santonian fossils are found on the surface throughout the property. Well-preserved fossil wood and leaves of angiosperms (flowering plants), and fossil gymnosperms (non-flowering plants that produce seeds such as conifers) have been found. Fossil angiosperm leaves show evidence of having been consumed by ancient insects. Fossil seeds, fruits, cones, and pollen and spores are also preserved.

The Coniacian-Santonian is a key interval because:

1. Terrestrial landscapes are relatively poorly understood for this time interval (due to the lack of fossiliferous terrestrial exposures relative to other times of the Cretaceous, and to the extent of marine deposits);
2. This period immediately follows the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, which is thought to have driven migration of tropical plants (including angiosperms) into higher latitudes, and
3. It captures the key time slice during ecological expansion of flowering plants in southern parts of North America

The age and sediments suggest that other paleontological fossils may be present on the property, which could reasonably include hadrosaurs, ankylosaurs, ceratopsians, therapods and other dinosaurs typical during that age. Although a dinosaur has not yet been found, promising small bone fragments have!

Very few technical papers about this immediate area have been published. Paleontological and geological articles concern younger deposits; like-age and same-Formation articles describe quite distant locales, or present broad-brush generalizations of the Western Cretaceous Seaway. The opportunity to make new finds, generate topics for thesis research, publish and conduct citizen science appears very promising.

Our Mission & Vision

 

Our Philosophy and Values

We champion multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary exploration, research and learning as a core value of RFS, and as a key part of our Mission. It sets us apart uniquely among field stations, and enables world-class research on a wide variety of topics. It also makes science a whole lot of fun, and we want to attract and inspire a new generation of explorers!!

In 2023, our inaugural year, we observed powerful and stimulating inter-disciplinary interactions in the field between Perot Museum’s paleobotanist Dori Contreras and New Mexico State University’s sedimentology/stratigraphy group led by Brian Hampton. The knowledge sharing, hypothesizing, and most importantly identifying unknowns, generated cooperative research programs that are set up to enrich undergraduate and graduate students, and the respective fields of the two institutions.

The specialized knowledge each institution brought to field exploration complemented each other’s gaps and provided faster insights, which otherwise might have required each individual specialty to outsource that complementary expertise post-field. Instead, they were integrating hypotheses while they were both standing in front of the outcrops, producing rich and nuanced conclusions. The key outcome: it also stimulated much bigger questions of tectonic and paleoclimatic scope, and global scale, which we call Big Science Questions. The pursuit of those bigger questions will benefit from the active participation of other disciplines: palynology, geochemistry, micropaleontology and others. Collaborations and correlations with other researchers working on same age deposits in other states along the Western Interior Seaway will enhance large-scale regional understanding.

RFS will continue to expand its constituents in learning and science. Careful and strategic identification of well-aligned research, education and outreach constituents is a key RFS strategy that has been very successful. We strive to assemble a collegial cohort of constituents, with whom we have long-lived relationships, who partner with each other and us in the spirit and realization of our shared vision. RFS is committed to supporting those partnerships with enabling grants, travel awards and scholarships for our programs.