Ant Hill Paleontology

[Adrienne Mayor <afmayor@aol.com>]

I'm trying to find out how many paleontologists use some form of the  
"ant hill method" when surveying an area for the best place to  
excavate fossils.

It's long been known that prospectors and archaeologists examine ant  
hills for minerals and tiny artifacts. The ancient Greek historian  
Herodotus reported that in India, ants collected gold sand. American  
Indians often gathered bits of quartz and fossils from ant hills for  
amulets.

In 1872 in Kansas, William Webb described a paleontologist (most  
likely Edward Drinker Cope) watching ants bring up, not gold or  
fossils, but tiny blue glass beads, indicating that an ancient Indian  
burial lay beneath the ant hill.

The “ant hill method of collecting minute fossils” was perfected in  
1886 by John Bell Hatcher, one of the most original and successful  
bone hunters of the pioneer paleontology era. Noticing that ant hills  
in the Nebraska-Dakota badlands yielded a “goodly number of mammal  
teeth,” Hatcher used a baker’s flour sifter to sort piles of ant hill  
sand. By this method, Hatcher wrote,  “I frequently secured from 200  
to 300 teeth and jaws from one ant hill.”

Hatcher went even further, he began transporting shovelfuls of sand  
and ants to other Cretaceous mammal localities that he had discovered  
in Nebraska and South Dakota. After two years he would return to the  
each site to harvest the ants’ “efficient service in collecting small  
fossils.” By 1888, Hatcher was scooping up entire ant mounds on the  
prairie and packing them into crates addressed to Professor O.C.  
Marsh at Yale University, where they were sifted by Marsh's students  
and assistants in the Peabody Museum lab for miniscule fossils of the  
earliest mammals.

Nowadays, many paleontologists examine ant hills for micro-fossils.  
I've heard of a Cretaceous mammal deposit in eastern Montana known as  
the Bug Creek Anthills site, after paleontologists gritted their  
teeth and braved the stinging red harvester ants to collect an  
astonishing 130 tiny mammal teeth in just 10 minutes. In 1965, fossil  
hunters found 5,000 fossil traces of more than 25 species in 100 ant  
hills in the Badlands of South Dakota. (these examples are from  
Mayor, Fossil Legends of the First Americans [2005], pp 218-19).

Are there others on the list who have used or know of various ant  
hill methods of paleontology a la Hatcher?

Thanks in advance, apologies for cross-posting.