In 2024 and 2025, I worked with the Karl E. Limper Geology Museum at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio to produce a series of murals depicting the ancient animals and environments preserved near their campus. These scenes complement their fossil displays in the cases and featured five different time periods: modern day, Cambrian, Ordovician, a “missing interval”, and Pleistocene (Ice Age).
Modern
This scene depicts a stylized version of well-known outcrop along Collins Creek in Peffer Park, just south of campus. There, large bluffs of glacial sediment overlie eroded Ordovician bedrock along the north bank of the creek. Pleistocene-age logs and glacial erratics erode out of the upper cliff, while fossils (including well-preserved trilobites) may be found in the limestone and shale of the Waynesville Formation below.
The stratigraphy of the Waynesville Formation depicted in the art is intended to be accurate bed-for-bed, based on photographic reference that I took of the bluffs as well as further outcrops upstream. Special thanks to Dr. Carl Brett and Ian Forsythe (University of Cincinnati) for providing their measurements and observations, as well.
This piece sets the stage for, and ties together, the Ordovician, Missing Interval, and Pleistocene scenes.
Look for interesting fossils and erratics in the creek bed, as well as a red-tailed hawk in the sky above.
Cambrian
Although Cambrian-age strata are not exposed anywhere in Ohio, they are present in the subsurface and have been sampled via drill core. This scene shows the Eau Claire Formation (named for Eau Claire, Wisconsin), layers of sandstone and mudstone that were deposited during the mid-to-late Cambrian, roughly 500 million years ago.
Islands of barren sand were surrounded by shallow seas (though we acknowledge that the presence of such large sand dunes in this part of Ohio may be a bit of a stretch). Fauna includes Skolithos vertical worm burrows, priapulid worms in U-shaped burrows, inarticulate brachiopods, dendroid graptolites, algae, hyoliths, and the trilobite Cedaria woosteri. The lower, underground portion of the artwork depicts sedimentary structures that are observed in the subsurface, including cross-bedding, hummocky cross-stratification, graded beds, and more.
Ordovician
This seascape depicts the fossils found in the Ordovician bedrock found near Oxford, including bryozoans, brachiopods, gastropods (snails), bivalves (clams), corals, crinoids, asteroids (starfish), cephalopods, trilobites, and more.
Missing Interval
The geologic record of the Oxford area has a ~443 million year gap extending from the Late Ordovician through Pleistocene. This “missing interval”, or unconformity, represents time periods when rock was eroded away or simply not deposited, due to a combination of regional uplift and global sea level changes.
However, this lack of a rock record should not be interpreted as times during which nothing was happening. Indeed, there were almost certainly just as many interesting creatures in Ohio during this interval as there were during times of sediment deposition. They simply aren’t preserved.
This speculative scene is intended to convey this easily overlooked aspect of geologic history with a depiction of Late Cretaceous Oxford at night. The brilliant Milky Way illuminates a misty coniferous forest, with lush ferns and horsetails surrounding a local wetland. While it is exceptionally unlikely that dinosaurs will ever be proven to have lived in Ohio, deductive reasoning suggests that they were in fact present. Thus, we chose to include Appalachiosaurus, an eastern cousin of Tyrannosaurus that has been found in the Late Cretaceous of Alabama.
Pleistocene
A vision of the glacial plains north of Oxford during the so-called “Ice Ages”, with woolly mammoths grazing in scruffy fields and boreal forest growing where the glaciers have receded. Important elements include the glaciers themselves, moraines, a braided outwash stream, and various glacial erratics (“foreign” rocks carried long distances by the ice).