During the past five years, renewed prospecting and collecting of mammalian fossils in the Florissant Formation within Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in central Colorado has nearly tripled the known diversity of fossil mammals from this rock unit. Taxa first recorded here from the Florissant Formation include the eomyid rodent Paradjidaumo trilophus , the lagomorph Palaeolagus , and the rare artiodactyl Pseudoprotoceras longinaris . We also describe an isolated deciduous premolar of a protoceratid. We update the mammalian faunal list of the Florissant Formation, which includes some 16 species in 13 families and 6 orders. The mammalian fauna corroborates the Chadronian (latest Eocene) age determined by others. Geographic ranges of Pelycomys , Palaeolagus , and Paradjidaumo trilophus are extended slightly southwest from northeastern Colorado, and the range of Pseudoprotoceras longinaris is extended southwest from Wyoming and Nebraska. Based upon comparison with nearest living relatives and plausible analogs, the mammalian taxa represented in the Florissant Formation seem to be consistent with the moist, warm temperate, relatively high elevation wetland and woodland habitats that have been inferred by others for the area in and around late Eocene Lake Florissant.

Eocene and Oligocene floras of the western United States show a climatic deterioration from warmer conditions to much cooler and drier conditions. Recent 40 Ar/ 39 Ar dates and magnetic stratigraphy have greatly improved their correlation. In this study, the uppermost Eocene Antero Formation, Colorado, is entirely reversed in polarity, and is correlated with late Chron C13r, based on 40 Ar/ 39 Ar dates of 33.77–33.89 Ma. The early Oligocene Pitch-Pinnacle flora of Colorado is within rocks of normal polarity, and best correlated with Chron C12n (30.5–31.0 Ma), based on 40 Ar/ 39 Ar dates of 32.9–29.0 Ma (although correlation with Chron C11n is also possible). The late Oligocene ( 40 Ar/ 39 Ar dated 26.26–26.92 Ma) Creede flora of southwestern Colorado is correlated with Chron C8r. The early Oligocene ( 40 Ar/ 39 Ar dated at 31.5 Ma) Granger Canyon flora in the Warner Mountains, near Cedarville, northeastern California, is correlated with Chron C12r. These results are compiled with previously published dates and magnetic stratigraphy of the Eugene-Fisher floral sequence in western Oregon, the Bridge Creek floras in central Oregon, other floras in the Warner Mountains of northeast California, and the Florissant flora of central Colorado. In Colorado, the climatic change seems to have occurred between the Florissant and Antero floras, and is dated between 33.89 and 34.07 Ma, or latest Eocene in age, although the Pitch-Pinnacle flora suggests that the deterioration was less severe and took place in the early Oligocene. In northeast California, the dating is not as precise, so the climatic change could have occurred between 31.5 and 34.0 Ma (probably early Oligocene). In western Oregon (Eugene and Fisher Formations), the change occurs between the early Oligocene Goshen flora (33.4 Ma) and the early Oligocene Rujada flora (31.5 Ma). In the John Day region of Oregon, it occurs before the oldest Bridge Creek flora, dated at 33.62 Ma (right after the Eocene-Oligocene boundary). Thus, only two of these four floral sequences (Eugene, Oregon, and Cedarville, California) clearly show the early Oligocene climatic change consistent with that documented in the global marine record, whereas the climatic change was seemingly abrupt in the late Eocene in Colorado between 33.89 and 34.07 Ma, and also sometime during the late Eocene (before 33.62 Ma) in central Oregon.

Abstract The Lagerstätte at Ashfall Fossil Beds—the result of supervolcanic eruption—preserves a mass-death assemblage of articulated skeletons of reptiles, birds, and mammals in a 3-m-thick pure volcanic ash near the base of the Cap Rock Member of the Ash Hollow Formation in Antelope County, Nebraska. The ash originated from the Bruneau-Jarbidge caldera in southwest Idaho, some 1600 km away, and it is geochemically matched with the Ibex Hollow tuff (11.93 Ma). Ashfall is a critical Clarendonian North American Land Mammal Age locality. More than 20 taxa—predominantly medium- and large-sized ungulates preserved in three dimensions—are buried in a late Miocene paleodepression (waterhole) filled with tephra reworked from the landscape by wind and water. Smaller taxa, such as birds, turtles, and moschids, died shortly after the pyroclastic airfall event and their remains are preserved in the basal ash. Remains from the medium-sized ungulates (equids and camelids) are separated from the underlying smaller skeletons by several centimeters of ash, indicating that these animals died at a slightly later time. In turn, more than 100 mostly intact skeletons of the barrel-bodied rhinoceros, Teleoceras major , overlie the remains of the medium-sized taxa. Pathologic bone on the limbs and skulls of the horses, camels, and rhinos suggests short-term survival and slow death several weeks or months after the pyroclastic airfall event. Exquisite preservation in an information-rich context allows aspects of the behavior, social structure, intraspecific variability, and pathology of extinct species to be reconstructed.