Rocks provide insight into ancient times before complex animals existed. The oldest sedimentary rocks in Grand Canyon (the Bass Formation) allow us to glimpse into what things might have been like over a billion years ago. These rocks record the time known as the Mesoproterozoic Era (1.6 to 1.0 billion years ago), otherwise known as the ‘boring billion’. These rocks are thought to be the right age to indicate the end of an oddly stable world when continents were quiet and life was calm, yet they predate younger rocks that record extreme events. The Bass Formation, some of the only rock of this age in the world, contains evidence for life and the carbon cycle, and yields information about Earth’s environments 1.2 billion years ago. The carbon cycle can be studied using carbonate rocks. Assuming that the rock has the same chemistry as the water it formed in, we can measure the relative abundance of carbon isotopes to see a ‘fingerprint’ of the system during the time the rock was deposited. During the boring billion, it is thought that very little variation occurs in this fingerprint. However, as more studies are completed, we see a modest variation in units around the age of the Bass Formation. The fingerprint results from this study can be added to the growing collection of Mesoproterozoic studies and help to further our knowledge about the world from this not-so-boring period of time.

This thesis is a proposal for a large contemporary art museum on the Presidio Parade Grounds in San Francisco, California. The site is small and historic, thus my solution was to build primarily underground. Through my exploration of designing a subterranean art museum I addressed the challenges of natural lighting, circulation, and curation. The following images document the result of my studies. / Master of Architecture

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Chester Stock in 1936 described Harrington's extinct mountain goat, Oreamnos harringtoni, based upon six skeletal elements recovered from Smith Creek Cave, Nevada. Until recently it was rarely encountered in fossil deposits of western North America and was inadequately understood. One hundred ten skeletal elements recovered from eight dry cave and wood rat midden deposits in the Grand Canyon, Arizona, enable a re-examination and redescription of the extinct species. Characters of the skull indicate that O. harringtoni was distinct from, yet similar to O. americanus, the living form. The extinct species was generally smaller overall than O. americanus, with proportionally more robust jaws. Occasionally, the fossil forms are as large as the extant species. Preserved keratinous horn sheaths and large cuboid dung pellets assigned to O. harringtoni provide carbon isotope ages directly on the extinct species. The youngest age determined on horn sheaths is 12,580±520 B.P., while the youngest age from large cuboid dung pellets is 10,870±200 B.P., both from Stanton's Cave. Hair assigned to the extinct species indicates that it had a white coat. Plant fragments in the dung indicate it ate predominantly grasses, but it also browsed heavily on Ceonothus-Cercocarpus, Prunus, Pseudotsuga, and Sphaeralcea. Oreamnos harringtoni appears to have been restricted to the Great Basin-Intermountain Region, and evolved from an ancestral population of O. americanus since the Sangomonian, in less than 100,000 years. The species became extinct by approximately 11,000 B.P.

Section 1: Watershed-based Plan, Section 2: Pollutant Risk Ranking, Section 3: Watershed Management and Improvements, Appendix A: Soil Classification, Appendix B: Water Quality Data and Assessments, Appendix C: AGWA Tool, Appendix D: Suggested Readings

This thesis is written as an experiment in instrumentation and the factors of technical limitations of the typical Class C high school band. The criteria used in determining the instrumentation and the difficulty of the composition are certain findings with regard to grading of high school band music as found in John Phillip Dalby's Doctoral Dissertation, A STUDY OF INSTRUMENTATION, MUSICAL ACTIVITIES AND TECHNICAL COMPETENCE AS FACTORS IN ARRANGING FOR HIGH SCHOOL BAND.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, 2005. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-117).

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