Lehi F. Hintze (1921–2014)

Millard County is named after the President (the county seat is in Fillmore). It has interesting geology but not world-class; there are plenty of other areas in the western US where the geology is equally or more diverse and dramatic. However, it was the chosen field area of Lehi F. Hintze, and he spent a lifetime (born April 14, 1921; died July 1 2014) studying it. This book is the result. I confess it’s just a little disappointing. Hintze had a reputation as an outstanding field instructor, but the book is not a field guide; there are no road logs or even directions to various areas of interest. Instead it’s a very straightforward geological history of the subject county, starting in the preCambrian and working up to Quaternary sediments, with chapters on physiography and structure.


Like much of this part of the US, Millard County has plenty of geological structure, being involved in several mountain building events plus the extensional faulting involved in the Basin and Range province of adjacent Nevada. That further complicates the stratigraphy, as little bits and pieces of various formations have been scattered around, overturned, and generally jumbled. Hintze seems to have gone over the county on his hands and knees, investigating every single rock exposure, as the book covers tiny little exposures of every formation, sometimes far removed from their type outcrops by faulting.


Being a lapsed paleontologist, I was especially interested in the discussion of the Middle Cambrian Wheeler Shale, as this is the only place where you can reasonably access rock with “Burgess Shale” fossils (your other choices would be coastal Newfoundland, northern Greenland, the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, central China and, of course, the Burgess Shale in Canada). I had therefore picked up the book with idea of hunting down my own personal Hallucigenia. Unfortunately it turns out that although the Wheeler Shale does contain some fossils of soft-bodied Burgess Shale type forms, the outcrop area is relatively small and difficult to get to and the fossil preservation is not as good as the other “Burgess Shale” sites – for soft-bodied forms at least. For trilobites, however, it’s world-class; if you’ve ever been to a rock shop almost anywhere in the world there’s usually a little bin or cup or something of nickel-sized gray trilobites. These are Elrathia kingi, and they quite literally pop out of the Wheeler Shale in carload lots; Hintze estimates several million trilobite fossils, mostly Elrathia kingi, have been removed by commercial collectors strip-mining the Wheeler Shale over the years.


Still, I think Millard County is probably worth a trip. There are probably some other field guides out there that would actually give directions to places, and you could fall back on Hintze’s book as an encyclopedic reference.… (altro)