A historical aside sets up the story of the research that Hartman tuned into: a scientific thread that was about 150 years old when he picked it up.  It’s musty stuff, but eagerly remembered by a UND scientist with a sharp eye for detail and a feel for the ancient connections that define current reality.

Hislop, a young fellow who was keen on both religion and research, studied the “natural sciences” at Edinburgh University and divinity at Glasgow and Edinburgh.  His biographers tell us that Hislop, inspired by several prominent evangelists of the era — including John Wilson, who went to India in the mid-1840s — believed that good missionaries were also engaged intellectuals.  Where scholarship and research went, there followed the Christian religion.

Wilson, who believed likewise, called home for scientific help.  He got Hislop, who went to Nagpur, also famous as the “Orange City,” to open a mission that had been endowed by an army officer.  Hislop remained in India until he died — and he lived in the midst of the Deccan Traps, where, while managing his mission, he dug up artifacts and sank his inquisitive mind into extensive botanical, archeological, and geological research.

Hislop set up a school in Nagpur that eventually became Hislop College.  Like any good scientist, he wrote a lot, although it subsequently went largely unread.  In fact, Hartman notes, Hislop was defining new areas of knowledge that few people knew about, especially the Indian geology and Deccan Trap studies that nabbed Hartman’s attention.

“He did amazing work in the Deccan Traps, but it wasn’t pursued much after his death (he drowned accidentally while crossing a flood-swollen river during a paleontological expedition),” Hartman said, acknowledging, as Sir Isaac Newton did, that his work, his discoveries, and his scientific insight depend on the work of researchers like Hislop who labored before him.  His work, Hartman says, is about making connections, linking past and present, and keeping a clear perspective on history, geological or human.

Hartman knows a thing or two about connections across eons.
“My research projects have primarily spanned the Late Cretaceous, Paleocene, and early Eocene (80 to 50 million years ago), which means an ongoing interest in the pattern of continental molluscan extinction and recovery across the K/T boundary,” Hartman said.  That boundary, well-known among geologists, paleontologists, and other earth science researchers, defines the interval of abrupt change in Earth’s history that closed the Cretaceous (K) Period and opened the Tertiary (T) Period, explains Hartman, also a senior research advisor at the Energy & Environmental Research Center.

Through publications and his well-documented explorations in North Dakota’s Williston Basin and in Montana, Hartman has established a solid reputation among his peers for discoveries relating to the K/T boundary.  Like any good forensic investigator, Hartman was on the lookout for connections across wide geographic ranges that could help scientists understand the nature of that event.  That line of inquiry took him to the Deccan Traps near Nagpur in western India.

The Deccan Traps, covering an area roughly the size of Washington state and Oregon combined — about 200,000 square miles — are one of the world’s largest volcanic regions.  The traps consist of a layer of basaltic lava flows more than a mile thick.  It is one of the largest volcanic provinces in the world, with a basalt volume of about 12.2 cubic miles.  The 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption produced about half a cubic mile of volcanic material.

“They’re really similar to the Columbia River basalts,” said Hartman, who, like some of his colleagues, believes that the Deccan basalts help explain the extinction of the dinosaurs.

“What we think is that most of the basalt was volcanically erupted a little over 65 million years ago,” Hartman said.  These eruptions also produced gases resulting in a radical global climate change that altered existing continental ecosystems, along with coincident events such as a giant impactor and changes in global sea levels.  Food chains were disrupted, creating a tremendous loss of animal and plant diversity.  Among the most compelling tips about what actually happened back then are the fossilized remains of continental mollusks buried in the Deccan Trap layers.  They’re so small, Hartman notes, that you can easily miss them or mistake them for something insignificant.
This is making an intellectual mountain from a miniscule snail.  And it sets this UND-based research apart from a lot of big-picture paleontology that has everyone focused on the really Big Kahunas of the K/T era: the T-rex and his victims.

So why the Deccan Traps?
“One of the things to understand is where Indian fauna, such as these little mollusks, came from,” Hartman explains.  “They were evolving in the absence of contact with other species.  It is like Australia, in a sense, with its highly endemic biota, such as the marsupials (wallabies and kangaroos, for example).”

“India is geologically an island — a very big island,” Hartman said.  “The big-picture issue is when did India contact another land mass?  If you do this through time, starting when the  land world was Pangea (a mega-continent from which all of today’s continents are separated), you can track where families of organisms exist.”

It’s part of a huge puzzle about where we come from and how today’s geography was shaped by massive, million-year events that scientists only relatively recently in geological time began to piece together in detail.
“What I basically want to do is track landscapes,” Hartman said.  “It gives you the sense of potential for where organisms could exist.  Say you have Upper Jurassic formations (full of dinosaurs), lots of huge sauropods.  When that preservational window ends, does the existence of the genetic pool that represents that biota end, too?”
In more descriptive scientific language, “this sculptured unionid clam was described from the type area of the Hell Creek Formation in Garfield County, Montana,” Hartman said.
“Nearly as soon as it was described, T.D.A. Cockerell (a Victorian-era naturalist with no college degrees) recognized that this form and the assemblage to which this mollusk belongs do not appear to exist beyond the extinction of the dinosaurs.  This idea was based on nearly no data, but has proven to be true in large degree.  One of my research interests is documenting and describing the pattern and rate of origination/immigration and extinction of molluscan taxa in the Williston Basin, in particular, and elsewhere in North America at the end of the Cretaceous.”

Hartman says any way you slice it (or dig it up) the answer isn’t as clean or unequivocal as a burial.  When species seem to cease to exist in the fossil record, that doesn’t necessarily mean the total loss of the descendents’ gene pool (DNA).

“Fossil preservation windows are fickle,” he said.  “Understanding the Indian island molluscan fauna is a good case in point.  What is the origin of the isolated fauna, and did any part of it survive Deccan volcanism and influence the evolution of modern Indian and Asian molluscan biota?”

And that, Hartman concludes, is where a fingernail-sized little creature that once crawled along a rock face 66 million years ago in a forbidding Indian landscape connects to enduring questions about the origin of modern faunas.