The Nabon Basin, Ecuador. South America Elizabeth Kowalski is documenting the vegetation, climate and elevation of the Nabon Basin, Ecuador to paint a picture of the environment of the Northern Andes during the initial stages of Andean uplift. Initial results indicate that this area was cloaked in lower montane forest during the Middle to Late Miocene. Robyn Burnham is interested in the migration or lack of migration between North and South America in the later Tertiary. She is intent on reconstructions of paleogeography that take into account modern distribution as well as the presence of taxa in fossil floras in well dated rocks of both continents.
Current research focuses on montane basins in Ecuador and lowland basins in eastern Bolivia.
Peter Wilf and colleagues have initiated research in the Laguna del Hunco Formation of Chubut Province, Patagonia, Argentina, which contains one of the most diverse and best-preserved fossil floras from the South American Paleogene. This flora is under study for potentially valuable information about continental vegetation and climates in Paleogene Southern mid-latitudes. Wilf and colleagues have reconstructed the flora, fauna, and paleoclimate of Big Multi Quarry , a site that contains an exceptionally diverse mammalian fauna from the late Paleocene of southwestern Wyoming. Peter has also reconstructed changes in climate and vegetation through the entire late Paleocene and early Eocene of southwestern Wyoming. Robyn Burnham works on early Paleocene floras from the Raton Basin of New Mexico.