“Don’t Drink the Dirty Chai” - An Examination of Macrofossils in the Grinnell College Peat Deposit
Isabella Vergara, Hayden Bhavsar, Anna Lipari, Nate L’Esperance Driving down Interstate 80 , or almost anywhere else in Iowa, what do you see? It’s often fields, sometimes rolling, with sparse groups of deciduous trees poking out from the endless expanse of corn and soybeans. To most, the lack of, well, anything at all , creates a bland impression of the Hawkeye State. However, what if we were to tell you it wasn’t always this brown slab of corn? Would you ever assume that at some point, Iowa was a coniferous swampland akin to the vast forests of the United States’ Northwoods regions or Western Ontario? Grinnell Professor Ben Graham has helped to prove that Iowa indeed has an interesting, decidedly very different past. Way back in the ancient, bygone, prehistoric era of 1960, Professor Ben Graham began to inspect the excavation site of what would eventually become a new Fine Arts center for Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. After digging a mere 2.5 feet below the excavati...