A History Of the Beatty Museum

The Museum

Three ladies that had been raised in Beatty, played in Rhyolite, and had roamed the hills of the Bullfrog Mining District, realized that a very important part of history was being lost. Over coffee at a local restaurant, they cheap car insurance put together the Beatty Museum and Historical Society. Talking all their friends in becoming members they opened their physical therapy Seattle first museum in a small cottage in 1995. They soon outgrew the little cottage through the generosity of the residents of Beatty. It seemed like memories were being brought in from everywhere. It soon became apparent that they needed a larger building, and leased the old water building across the street. That worked well for another 5 years. Again they outgrew the building, Purchasing the building they are currently in, and revamping what needed to be denver injury attorney revamped, the Museum is now open on Main ice cream maker Street in a wonderful Historical Church. The Museum has expanded the original building making room for a larger collection and a research room. You are invited to browse the documents, photos and books housed there. Special projects are ongoing and will be listed on the virtual museum created here. The Society is a private non profit organization with approximately 200 members in the United States and Europe. The Museum was granted it’s 501(c)3 status in 2001. We are actively searching for volunteers to assist in the Museum.

Mission Statement

It is the intention of the Beatty Museum and Historical Society to preseve the history of the Bullfrog Mining District and Southern Nye County. Research can be conducted in a friendly warm atmosphere with plenty of help from the Museum Staff. Visit the museum while in the Beatty area and learn about the mining boom of the 1900′s and how it impacts our lives today.

Searching Your Family History

Family research can be an opportunity to learn about the history, geography, law, Medicine and customs of other times and places. Interesting, rewarding and a legacy to future Generations.

It is best to begin the story of your family with the current generation and work Medigap Plans backwards. Instead of immediately visiting a genealogy library, HDMI switch gather as much information as you can from talking to other family members. You might want to use a tape recorder or video camera to record their reminiscences. Try to obtain copies of any records that family members possess. Write to all the relatives that you know requesting copies of Bible records, photographs, birth, baptismal, marriage and death certificates, offering to trade copies of what you find.

Organize your records and from the beginning, make careful notes of where you obtain each document. Write down 1200 calorie diet any information you find out. Record the information as though you were writing for someone who knows nothing about your family. Fill out forms spelling the names in full. Begin to fill out pedigree charts and family group sheets for each family. Filling out family group sheets will Denver Divorce Lawyer help keep your information organized and show you how much you already know about your family. It will also show what information you still free ipad need to find out.

When you have collected all the information you can from family members, it is time to begin searching the public records that are available. A good place to start is the federal census. This personal injury attorney Orlando state-by-state list of residents no no hair removal has been taken by the government every ten years since 1790. The federal government sometimes also took special censuses of veterans, slaves, and iphone ringtones Native Americans living on reservations. In addition, individual states have taken censuses that can contain information that is different from the federal census.

Records that we take for granted today, such as birth and death certificates, are recent developments and access to them may be restricted. Many public records such as deeds, wills, marriage licenses, massage in Seattle naturalization records, tax rolls, and vital statistics registers may be available Casio Pathfinder only in the town or county where your ancestors resided.

Also known as Jim, Montillus Beatty moved to a small ranch in Nevada after fighting for the Union in the Civil War. An Oasis in the desert, Jim lived comfortably with his Paiute wife.With the discovery of gold by Shorty Harris and Ed Cross towns began to pop up everywhere. In 1905 Bob Montgomery staked out a townsite near the ranch and named it Beatty with Jim as the first Postmaster. In March of 1906 he gave up his position as Postmaster and sold his ranch and springs to the Bullfrog Power and Light Company. Jim Beatty along with a friend, had been hauling firewood when he fell off the wagon How to Lose Weight Fast and hit his head, he died one day later at the age of seventy-three.

ll of the fossils at the Beatty bioherm occur chiropractic marketing in the oldest sections of the Middle Ordovician Antelope Valley Limestone, roughly 480 million years old. The specimens are restricted to sporadic, productive pockets within the core of the mudmound and to, more abundantly, the medium gray to Joann Fabrics coupons olive-gray and olive-brown shaley limestones along the flanks and directly above the mudmound itself. Several of the limestone beds consist almost entirely of the fragmental remains of echinoderm debris, a type of rock geologists call encrinite; additionally, one of the more fascinating echinoderm finds includes the mysterious and enigmatic parablastoids, strange types that are confined electronic cigarette to strata of Middle Ordovician age–their webdesign small isolated plates are sometimes quite common in the limestone beds that flank the mudmound, a fact which attracts echinoderm enthusiasts worldwide to the great Beatty bioherm. Still other calcium carbonate layers contain prolific quantities of brachiopods, most of which are rather tiny, measuring roughly eight to 12 millimeters long. Trilobites reputation management are also excellently represented by upwards of 20 genera, although their preservation leaves much to be desired. They are for the most part fragmental, consisting of isolated pieces of the head shield, thorax and tail. Sometimes the sharp spines that were Plastic Bins attached to the cephalon and body are all that remain to help identify a species of trilobite. Rarer constituents include nautiloids, pelecypods, ostracodes, bryozoans, sponges, algae, gastropods and conodonts.

The conodonts are a fascinating fossil type. Measuring only one to three millimeters long, conodonts are minute jaw-like specimens that for over a century were thought to have come from worms or perhaps some primitive extinct species of fish. They first appear in the geologic record during the Late Cambrian (roughly 515 million years ago) but San Diego Homes For Rent are especially characteristic of the Ordovician through Mississippian Periods. Although they persisted well into the Triassic Period of the Mesozoic Era–the age of reptiles–most conodonts had become extinct by the close of the Permian Period 245 million years ago.

Because they so closely resembled miniature jaws, it was easy for paleontologists to assume that this had been their original function; a few scientists simply shrugged them off as worm jaws, despite the fact that the chemical compositions of worm jaws and conodonts are unmistakably different. Talk about a fossil that got no respect! More serious investigators theorized that they might have belonged to the gill apparatus of several extinct species of fish. Another nice try. Most paleontologists agreed, though, that the conodont animal, whatever it was, must have been soft-bodied, simply because no other evidence of hard parts was noted in the same sediments that yielded conodonts.

Nobody had seriously expected to find the actual conodont animal–after all, a hundred-plus years of collecting couldn’t be wrong–but at last, it appeared, that trotinette freestyle the incredible discovery forex software reviews had been made in 1968 in the Little Snowy Mountains of Montana. Here, in the fine-grained shales of the transitional Late Mississippian and Early Pennsylvanian deposited 320 million years ago, the mystery, for short spell at least, appeared to be resolved once and for all. What scientists had recovered from the Montana locality was a small fish-shaped chordate (it seemed to possess a primitive spinal cord, although this was more like a partial notch just behind the head), which had a single fin Wire Shelving on its back for stability and a tail fin for swimming. Based on the first 24 carbonized outlines of the body cavity unearthed, the purported conodont animal averaged a little under 12 millimeters hcg diet drops in length. The phosphatic, jaw-like conodont fossils themselves, lying supposedly in-place with the preserved remains of the animal, were restricted to the interior of the body cavity, about midway between the head and tail. Scientists immediately conjectured that the conodont structures served fast cash loans to circulate water currents through the body and acted as sieves, as well.

But, something was wrong with the entire scenario. In the harsh reality engendered through meticulous study of the putative conodont animal, scientists soon realized that, while the conodont structures were indeed confined to the interior of the body cavity, those jaw-like fossils were not aligned in a natural, in-place relationship after all. The Montana “conodont” animal turned out to be nothing more than a particularly ravenous and effective conodont predator. Sure, the Montana critter had all kinds of conodont structures inside the body cavity, but the conodonts got there Chinese translation through ingestion.

Back to square one. Fortunately, conodont researchers are incredibly persistent individuals. And that persistent attitude eventually paid off: in 1982, Dr. E. N. K. Cradlesong finally discovered the actual conodont animal in Carboniferous (the blu cigs coupon European equivalent of San Diego Homes For Rent the Mississippian and Crossfit Denver Pennsylvanian Periods combined) rocks in Scotland. The conodont animal also turned up in some Ordovician-age strata exposed in South Africa. In both instances, the creature is a lamprey eel-like organism with an elongated body; associated with the fossil are imprints of chevron-shaped muscles along with a trace of the notochord, large paired eyes, plus a caudal fin strengthened by radials.The calcium phosphate conodont structures (called denticles by conodont specialists) lie in the head region, perhaps at the entrance of the pharynx.

The Beatty bioherm exposures are the westernmost outcrops of the Middle Ordovician Antelope Valley Limestone, a rock formation named for Antelope Valley in central Nevada. Age-equivalent limestones and dolomites exposed throughout the mountains bordering Death Valley are referred to as the Pogonip Group. However, these carbonate rocks are virtually barren of common fossil remains; the most widespread specimen encountered is a large gastropod called Palliseria robusta, the very same species found at the type locality of the Antelope Valley Limestone and at the Beatty mudmound.

Rocks of the Pogonip Group in the Death Valley district are almost everywhere dolomitized and recrystallized due to hydrothermal alteration, so it is no wonder that there is such a paucity of paleontology (not so in western Utah, though, where Lower Ordovician through Middle Ordovician strata lumped into the Pogonip Group yield abundant, beautifully preserved fossils). A more direct correlation of rocks exists with the Middle Ordovician Badger Flat Limestone exposed in the Inyo Mountains, California. The Badger Flat Limestone yields abundant brachiopods, echinoderms and trilobites, several species of which are identical to those that occur in the Antelope Valley Limestone at the Beatty bioherm.

The mudmound/bioherm occurs in the bottom, or oldest, layers of the Antelope Valley Limestone, as do the other two somewhat smaller bioherms exposed in the neighboring Nevada Test Site. The bioherm is a massive unstratified mound of pure calcium carbonate within the core of which noticeable invertebrate fossils are sporadically abundant. An unusual type of cavity is also present within the mudmound, a structure that contributes up to 20 percent of the mass–stromatactis (flat-bottom cavities with irregular tops that are filled with fibrous calcite); geologists are still puzzled just how these kinds of cavities developed in the mudmound, but a plausible explanation, offered by geologist Adam D. Woods, is that stromatactis formed as a result of “fluids migrating upwards through the mound from below” during “dewatering” of the underlying sediments. Yet another fascinating geophysical structure at the Beatty mudmound is the so-called zebra limestone development–an incredibly thick cyclic repetition of tightly laminated calcium carbonate strata that has defied a definitive explanation. An early idea was that zebra limestones were created by monstrous algae mats, which helped bind the limestones together into such a distinctive and baffling laminated condition; that seemed reasonable, a working hypothesis, one might say, but the latest conclusion is that zebra limestones at the Beatty mudmound probably formed by shear failure, or, as professor Adam D. Woods, says, “possibly even through fluid flow after much of the mound was lithified, and the stromatactis network became ‘plugged’ with cement.”

The Ordovician mudmounds/bioherms were large mounds of calcite mud whose initial deposition occurred in waters probably not more than 100 feet deep. Their surfaces were evidently held together by mats of algae, which in turn helped trap and bind additional mud, causing the mass to grow. At no time did these bioherms rise above the surface of the water. They were, in effect, huge underwater sand dunes–or more accurately termed “mud dunes,” if you will, able to trap calcareous sediments driven by the prevailing sea currents. The mudmound near Beatty probably developed scores of miles from the ancient Ordovician shoreline in seawater shallow enough to allow monstrous algae mats to flourish and enormous quantities of animal life to thrive along the flanks of the mound.

Because the abundant Beatty mudmound fossils are completely silicified, the specimens are amenable to acid treatment for removal from their limestone matrix. Many fossil collectors are familiar with the use of diluted hydrochloric acid to process silicified fossils entombed in limestone. In the hands of a knowledgeable, especially cautious worker, hydrochloric acid–one of the most potent acids known–is not an overly hazardous material. For processing a bulk of rock within a short period of time, no other acid works quite as well. Still, this writer does not like to work around it, and many other collectors have echoed the same sentiment. The fumes are toxic, even lethal; the slightest mishandling can cause frightful burns, and delicate fossils often don’t stand a chance under the vigorous dissolution of the matrix. Not only that, but one can never recover the calcium phosphate conodont fossils while using hydrochloric acid. For these reasons, using one of the less-potent organic acids, either acetic or formic, seems preferable. This is not to say that such acids do not require the same kind of caution that hydrochloric demands. It’s just that, should you happen to accidently spill some acetic or formic acid on bare skin, you have a much better chance of preventing serious burns by washing immediately and repeatedly with cold water.

An effective brew is concocted using a 20-percent solution of formic acid: five parts water to one part acid. When diluting it, always remember to pour the acid into the premeasured volume of water, never the other way around, an act that could result in dangerous splattering due to a sudden overheating of the solution. Use only plastic or glass basins for the dissolving; and wear safety goggles at all times while working around acid! When all the rock is finally dissolved, carefully dispose of the spend acid solution, then rinse the remaining residues repeatedly with fresh water to prevent caking of the fossils by residual compounds formed during the chemical reaction between the calcium carbonate and the acid. Let the residues dry, then transfer them to a clean sheet of paper. Use tweezers to remove observed fossils for storage.

While in the neighborhood, visitors to the Beatty mudmound/bioherm district might want to combine fossil seeking with a trip to nearby Death Valley National Park. The Visitor’s Center, resort and Death Valley Museum at Furnace Creek are only 38 miles from Beatty–a quick “fossil’s throw” away by vehicle. Along the way, though, you may want to take a detour through Titus Canyon, whose turnoff lies six miles east of Beatty along State Route 374. This is an ultra-scenic one-way route that winds through a narrow passage in the Grapevine Mountains, eventually connecting with California State Route 178 in the heart of Death Valley, 18 miles south of Scotty’s Castle. Along the path through Titus Canyon, you can examine the Lower Oligocene Titus Canyon Formation, 35 million years old, a thick accumulation of muds, sandstones and conglomerates that entombed the remains of many species of extinct animals, including rodents, a dog, a horse, a titantothere, a rhino and oreodonts. The assemblage of vertebrate fossils is indicative of a lush green environment, well-watered, a scene that probably resembled a modern-day tropical forest–direct fossil evidence that creates one of the most startling contrasts imaginable: presentday Death Valley, synonymous with sand and heat and aridity, was once a luxuriant forest in which a multitude of animals thrived.

Springtime and mid to late Fall are customarily considered the most comfortable times to visit this Great Basin Desert land. At an elevation of 3,284 feet, Beatty stays a little less hot in the summer than its sizzling neighbor Death Valley, but the difference, measured in five to ten degrees at the most, is arguably negligible, although the higher altitude certainly contributes to a much-welcomed cooling during the evening hours.

Beatty, of course, offers the usual ingredients of civilization–motels, restaurants, service stations, a grocery store, shops and that fascinating institution: gaming. It is in fact a very friendly place to visit. The community makes an excellent jumping-off point for explorations of Death Valley and the great Beatty mudmound/bioherm.

The Bullfrog silver boom of the early 1900s brought Beatty to life. Now it is tourism to Death Valley, gaming, and the reliable arrival of motorists passing through along Highway 95 that contribute to the prosperity of the town–an economy apparently safe, for the time being at least.

Yet, one thing is for certain. Should Beatty eventually become a ghost town, joining its Bullfrog neighbor Rhyolite in silence, that great bioherm in the vicinity of town, visible from Daylight Pass near the eastern entrance to Death Valley some 20 miles away, will continue to rise majestically above the desert floor, its 480 million-year-old fossils emphasizing the mutability of man’s designs.

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