Casper’s Cretaceous Sea Fossils

J. P. Cavigelli, The Tate Geological Museum

So, you wanna see some cool fossils from right here in Casper?  Well, let’s start with a housing development near Sagewood Elementary School.  Early in my career at the Tate a local fellow brought us some unusual fossils he had found in a pile of rock removed from some future basements.  This led the Tate to exploring the site and collecting over 250 fossils from here over several visits.  The fossils are form the Cody Shale, which is known to produce fossil, primarily in concretions.  Most of these fossils are in the shale itself, rather than in concretions.  The fossils tend to be impressions with very little organic material left.  But many are fossils of creatures we rarely see in the Cody Shale and other Western Interior Seaway deposits.  Come to this presentation for a trip into the Cretaceous sea as it is seen right here in Casper.       

Jean-Pierre Cavigelli

               JP Cavigelli was born back east in the summertime, of Swiss immigrant parents (from the type Jurassic area).  He is prep lab manager and field trip organizer and collections manager at that Tate Geological Museum at Casper College.  As a biology major at the University of Chicago, JP became interested in paleontology, although way too late to get a degree in it.  This led him to a summer spent in Wyoming (mostly in the Big Horn Basin) in 1983 doing field work in search of small Cretaceous mammal teeth with a University of Wyoming team.  JP fell in love with Wyoming but left for a five year adventure in fun and poverty as a ski bum and whitewater rafting guide in Colorado and Australia.  JP came back to Wyoming in 1990 to be part of a paleontology field crew at the UW again.  He lived in Laramie working off and on in paleontology for 14 years, doing field work as well as a two year post as the Collections Manager for the UW's Dept. of Geology and Geophysics.  He also was a fossil outfitter, running Western Paleo Safaris for six years.  For the past 25 or so years, JP has been doing freelance fossil preparation in his personal prep lab.  He has had the good fortune of having been invited to join international paleontological expeditions to Niger, Mongolia, Tanzania, Alaska and North Dakota.  In his 19 years at the Tate Museum he has led collecting trips all over the state to collect small and large fossils from Dee the Mammoth and Lee Rex to microscopic mammal teeth and really old insects and ichthyosaurs.  When he is not involved with fossils JP enjoys birdwatching, traveling, and hanging out with his supercalifragilisticexpialidocious wife (they were married on a dinosaur skeleton).