This is phase two of the Denver Basin Project that began in 1996 and resulted in a cored well of the Denver Basin strata in Kiowa and a geological framework study that dated the recently discovered Castle Rock rainforest site at 63.8 million years.
In this National Science Foundation funded project (EAR-0345750), Dr. Johnson is collaborating with Bob Raynolds and Beth Ellis at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science to oversee a project that has two primary goals: study of the distribution of fossil leaves to understand ancient forests in the Denver and Middle Park Basins and why tropical rainforests occurred along the eastern flank of the Rockies in the early Paleocene; and the study of buried rock layers to understand the stratigraphy and status of the Denver Basin groundwater resource.
