Geoscience student studying fossil rabbits

Amanda Dopheide of Alliance is returning to the Toadstool Park area north of Crawford, thanks to help from the Nebraska Geological Society. She is one of two winners of the 2004 Yatkola-Edwards Undergraduate Research Grant to support geological studies. Her work, part of a senior thesis under the supervision of geoscience professor Dr. Mike Leite, is on the fossil rabbits in the Toadstool Park area.

Dopheide began work on her project in the summer of 2003 while helping Leite and Dr. Joe Corsini, CSC biology professor, collect data on fossil turtles in the Toadstool Park area of western Dawes and eastern Sioux counties. Dopheide said she is eager to continue researching the fossils, which derive from the Oligocene period 25-32 million years ago..

“I’m very excited about this project,” Dopheide said. “I’m looking forward to going back in the field. And I’d like to thank the Nebraska Geological Society for the opportunity.”

This is the first time a student from Chadron State College has won the Yatkola-Edwards grant. Previous winners had been students at colleges in eastern Nebraska.

“She’s got a great project here, and I’m pleased that the Yatkola-Edwards committee recognized her potential,” Leite said. “The kind of work Amanda is doing is typical of what we want our students to accomplish -- good, accessible science with important consequences.”

She found numerous fossil rabbits in the rocks she was studying last summer and Leite encouraged her to study them because of their potential scientific value. While rabbits have been collected from the Toadstool rocks for decades, the different species found there have never been clearly distinguished. With careful measurements and descriptions of the fossils, Dopheide hopes to discover which species are present.

Students in CSC’s new geoscience major, as well as the other physical sciences options in chemistry and physics, are required to complete an original research topic which is presented as a senior thesis. Most geoscience students do some sort of field data collection as part of their project.

The Yatkola-Edwards grant is named for two geology students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Dan Yatkola and Paul Edwards, who were killed in an auto accident in 1976. The Nebraska Geological Society established the fund to encourage the kind of field-based geological research that Yatkola and Edwards did while students at UNL. The Society, with gifts from its members and outside donors, has awarded a total of 52 grants totaling $11,200 since 1977. The grants, intended to help defray field work or publication costs, are available for students studying the earth sciences at a Nebraska college or university.