Harrison J. Gray Jeffrey S. Pigati Jim Wilson Nathaniel A. Lifton James B. Paces Maarten Blaauw Shannon Mahan 2014 <p>The Ziegler Reservoir fossil site near Snowmass Village, Colorado, provides a unique opportunity to reconstruct high-altitude paleoenvironmental conditions in the Rocky Mountains during the last interglacial period. We used four different techniques to establish a chronological framework for the site. Radiocarbon dating of lake organics, bone collagen, and shell carbonate, and in situ cosmogenic ¹⁰Be and ²⁶Al ages on a boulder on the crest of a moraine that impounded the lake suggest that the ages of the sediments that hosted the fossils are between ~ 140 ka and &gt; 45 ka. Uranium-series ages of vertebrate remains generally fall within these bounds, but extremely low uranium concentrations and evidence of open-system behavior limit their utility. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages (n = 18) obtained from fine-grained quartz maintain stratigraphic order, were replicable, and provide reliable ages for the lake sediments. Analysis of the equivalent dose (D_E) dispersion of the OSL samples showed that the sediments were fully bleached prior to deposition and low scatter suggests that eolian processes were likely the dominant transport mechanism for fine-grained sediments into the lake. The resulting ages show that the fossil-bearing sediments span the latest part of marine isotope stage (MIS) 6, all of MIS 5 and MIS 4, and the earliest part of MIS 3.</p> application/pdf 10.1016/j.yqres.2014.03.004 en Elsevier A geochronologic framework for the Ziegler Reservoir fossil site, Snowmass Village, Colorado article