PART 1
Like its driftwood, the terra that became Nedonna Beach was washed ashore by ancient tides from origins unknown, where it was recycled from deep inside Earth’s mysterious convective mantle after eons of time.
3 billion-plus years ago: North America experienced the sea washing over its boundaries during its Proterozoic history. Life had flourished in the shallow tidewater. Little is known of early soft-bodied organisms, because they left no skeletons to become fossils. Only a handful of good fossils remain from the entire world's immense Precambrian rock record.
1,850 million years ago: North America's little Archean continents slam together in a series of mountain-building collisions. The core of North America is formed.
570-1,850 million years ago: North America's geologic setting became more like the world as we know it. The cores of the modern continents were assembled. Life was limited to bacteria and algae, and unbreatheable gases filled the atmosphere.
500 million years ago: Moving plates of oceanic crust, small pieces of land came to the coasts in this way as well. Numerous "exotic terrains," impacting on the western coasts during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras, adding areas now covered by British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, and Mexico. Nedonna Beach begins!
180–140 million years ago: A sizeable piece of continental crust attaches to southern Mexico. This little raft of continental crust was formed far from its present location, and the fossils in them are of creatures that lived halfway around the world, but never in North America.
150 to 65 million years ago: The age of dinosaurs begins.
150 to 65 million years ago: The volcanoes, in the Cretaceous Era when much of the state of Oregon was under water. Meat-eating reptiles such as plesiosaurs (Loch Ness monster-like creatures) roam our waters.
50 to 40 million years ago: The volcanoes covering Central and Eastern Oregon erupted more frequently, burying many plants and animals in ash.
54 to 6 million years ago: Large mammals like ancient rhinoceroses and horses lived in the area.
200,000 years ago: Man begins.
50,000 years ago: Modern man begins
600 years ago: Native Americans calling themselves the Nehalem settle between the Necanicum RiverTillamook Bay, with villages and subdivisions at Nehalem, Nestucca, Chishucks, Chucktin, Kilherhursh, Kilherner and Towerquotten and living in an area ranging from Cape Lookout to Cape Meares. As a coastal group of Native Americans, the word "Tillamook" actually means "Land of Many Waters" in their language, and was initially used to refer to the area itself rather than the tribe that inhabited it. and Estimates of the population were about 2200 in at the beginning of the 18th century.
200 years ago: Lewis and Clark explore the Northwest Passage and a smallpox epidemic comes with the arrival of the Oregon Trail. By 1841 only 400 Tillamooks remain.
100 years ago: The community of Rockaway was established as a seaside resort by the Rockaway Beach Company. It was named after Rockaway Beach on Long Island in New York. Rockaway was connected by train to Portland in 1912. The name of the city was changed to Rockaway Beach in 1987. No dinosaurs remain.
Now, fossils like the ichthyosaurs (dolphin-like marine reptiles) and Jurassic crocodiles are discovered and help scientists paint a picture of what life was like here hundreds of millions of years ago. Even before the volcanoes in the Cretaceous Era, much of the state of Oregon was under water. Meat-eating reptiles such as plesiosaurs (which may have looked a lot like the mythical Loch Ness monster) roamed our waters and one was even found by two amateur paleontologists and is believed to be the first remains of a plesiosaur in the Pacific Northwest.
No comments:
Post a Comment