Ralph Eshelman

Calvet Marine Museum · Paleontology

A lack of time and manpower led to the hurried sparsely documented construction of locally sourced earthen fortifications along Chesapeake Bay tributaries shortly before and during the War of 1812. Many of these defenses have been razed for development and the few that remain today face uncertain futures due to natural and/or human-induced erosion...

A small but significant assemblage of Late Pleistocene mammals was recovered from an eroding shoreline at Paw Paw Cove, located on the Chesapeake Bay side of Tilghman Island, Talbot County, Maryland. Additionally, Clovis-age (11,050–10,800 radiocarbon [14C] years before present) artifacts were found in a lag deposit beneath a loess deposit at the s...

Dozens of earthen forts, constructed of intricately shaped mounds of local soil, provided a key element of our national defense during the War of 1812. Although their constructors were not concerned with their long-term existence, topographic evidence of many of these unique geometric features remains on the landscape today. Given land-cover and la...

Fossil shark teeth were used by various prehistoric (pre-European) cultures in North America over the past 10,000 years. Archaeological data from the Chesapeake Bay region indicate that six different varieties of fossil shark teeth were collected, modified, and used by native cultures over the past 2,500 years. They include fossil teeth from the ex...

11-44 http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/48492/2/ID343.pdf

317-326 http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/48506/2/ID357.pdf

1-63 http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/48621/2/ID485.pdf

The Patuxent River is one of the few riverine systems on Maryland’s western shore of the Chesapeake Bay which will retains much of the original character found by the English in their early settlement of the region over 300 years ago (Shomette, 1979b). Cultivation of tobacco and tonging for oysters, using techniques basically unchanged over the cen...

Four morphologically distinct tayassuid species are present in the marine strata of the lower Chesapeake Group in Maryland and Virginia. The oldest of these, an unnamed species, occurs in bed 2 of the Calvert Formation and is the only terrestrial mammal yet known from this unit. In the upper Calvert and lower Choptank Formations three tayassuid spe...

The Hall Ash Pit molluscan faunule, consisting of 382 individuals representing 22 gastropod taxa, one sphaeriid clam and unionid shell fragments, was collected from silts associated with an ash deposited in the drainage basin of the ancestral Republican River. The molluscs were picked from a residue obtained by screenwashing about 1360 kg of silt e...

Sceloporus holmani from the late Pliocene of north-central Kanas, USA, is referred to the genus Phrynosoma. The fossil record of Phyrnosoma is discussed

1-60 http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/48613/2/ID476.pdf