GLOSSARY of Terms used in MCBONES Research and Education at the Coyote Canyon Mammoth Site

Alluvial Fan: A fan-shaped deposit of water-transported sediment (alluvium) deposited where a stream’s velocity is abruptly decreased, as at the mouth of a ravine or valley where it runs out onto a plain.

Water-transported sediment (gravel, sand, and silt).

Basalt: A dark, fine-grained extrusive volcanic rock that sometimes displays a columnar structure.

Bedrock: The hard, solid rock beneath surface materials such as soil and other sediments.

The churning and stirring of sediments by organisms (plants and animals).

Bone Scatter:
The distribution of bones scattered on the landscape or paleosurface (ancient land surface).

Calcium Carbonate Content:
The relative or numerical concentration of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) in sediments (often in the form of calcite), and used to infer pedogenesis (soil formation).

An individual particle or rock fragment (e.g. sand, gravel, fossil) broken off other rocks by physical weathering.

Colluvial Slopewash:
Sediment that has moved downhill to the bottom of a slope by the action of rain.

Dewatering Feature:
A soft sediment deformation structure caused by the expulsion of water during compaction of saturated sediment.

Drop Stones:
Isolated pebbles to boulders found within finer-grained water-deposited sediments inferred to have been dropped vertically through a body of water (such as from a floating iceberg).

Dry Sieve Analysis:
A particle size analysis method that separates sediments into different size fractions by shaking through a set of nested sieves (screens).


Extrusive Igneous Rock:
A rock formed from lava that erupted onto earth’s surface and solidified (volcanic rock).

A heterogeneous mixture of gravel and sand sized clasts often fairly angular and cemented together as in a conglomerate, and inferred to have been originally deposited in an alluvial fan.

Fluidized Bed:
A geologic structure formed when a fluid is passed through granular solid material at high enough velocities to suspend the solids and cause the material to behave as though it were a fluid.

The remains of plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and single-celled living things that have been replaced by rock material, or the impressions of organisms preserved in rock.


Glacial Till:
Unsorted sediment deposited directly by glacial ice.

Upper fore-leg bone.

Hydrofracking (Hydraulic Fracturing):
A process by which hydraulic pressure fractures (breaks) the rock/sediment.


Hydrometer Analysis:
A particle size analysis method that measures the density of a soil suspension using a hydrometer to incrementally determine the proportion of particle sizes that have settled out of suspension.

Ice Age Flood:
A generic term for cataclysmic glacial outburst floods (or jökulhlaup) that periodically swept across eastern Washington and down the Columbia River Gorge at the end of the last ice age.

Ice Age Flood Deposits:
Sedimentary materials deposited by an Ice Age Flood.

Ice Rafted:
Describes something that floated (rafted) in on an iceberg.

Injection Feature:
A geologic intrusion typically formed from a fluid-filled crack.

Krotovina: An animal burrow that has become filled with organic matter and soil material which are generally common in grassland soils.

Lake Lewis:
A temporary lake, rising to a maximum elevation of 1,250 feet, that repeatedly formed as Ice Age flood waters ponded behind a hydraulic constriction at Wallula Gap.

A wind-blown sedimentary deposit made mostly of silt-sized grains.

Lithic Fraction:
The fraction (relative percentage) of different rock fragment types.

A phenomenon whereby saturated or partially saturated sediment looses strength and stiffness in response to earthquake shaking or other rapid loading, causing the sediment to behave like a liquid (as in a fluidized bed).

Lower jaw bone.

Radiocarbon Dating:
The determination of the age (date) of a specimen from the relative proportions of its carbon isotopes carbon-12 and carbon-14.

Particle Size Analysis:
The measurement of sediment particle (clast) sizes to help classify the sediment and sedimentary environments.

The study of ancient life (as opposed to neobiology).

Climatic conditions of the ancient past.

The study of the relationships of ancient organisms with each other and their environment.

The environment of the ancient past.

Paleontology: The study of the history of life on Earth as recorded in fossils.

Paleosol: A former surface soil, now buried within the stratigraphy.

Pedogenic Calcium Carbonate: Secondary calcium carbonate deposits precipitated in soils.

Radiocarbon Dating: A method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of a radioactive isotope of carbon within the object. The method is also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating.

Sediment: Any loose natural material on the earth's surface, such as gravel, sand, mud, and soil.

Slackwater Facies: Bodies of sediment that were deposited out of a stretch of water without current or movement and are recognizably distinct from adjacent sediments that resulted from different depositional environments.

Soil: Sediment that is subaerial (exposed to the earth's atmosphere) and containing abundant organic matter.

Stable Isotope Analysis:
Laboratory measurement of stable isotopes (that do not change over time like radioactive isotopes) to determine the isotopic signature of key elements (e.g. carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, oxygen and hydrogen) within a specimen.

The arrangement of geologic layers (or strata), and the branch of geology concerned with studying the order and relative position of strata and their relationship to the geological time scale.

United States Geological Survey — a Federal Agency that provides impartial information on the health of ecosystems and environment, natural hazards, natural resources, and impacts of climate and land-use change.

X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) Analysis:
An analytical method for quantitative and qualitative analysis of elemental concentrations.