Saturday, June 14, 2014

Progress report!

Today was a little bizarre because it was busy and we were short staffed. This meant a short shift in the lab, an early lunch, and a long day in the Rhino Barn. Makes for a pretty good day, actually.

In the Rhino Barn, I'm slowly working around one of the burrows that I came across. As a rule, we don't leave the burrows; generally, we dig into them in hopes that we will hit bone either in or below them. But this one in particular is a really weird shape, and so I am pedastooling it. (Rick wants to save it. Looks like I will get to do some jacketing here after all!)

In case you don't know, we DO NOT move bone in the Barn. We leave it exactly how it is found for the viewing of visitors and researchers. It is so much more valuable in place. Most places don't have enough fossils to support a building around them, or else I suspect more fossil sites would be enclosed to protect the specimens. Most have a lot of fragments if anything though, and it is better just to get them out of the field, into the lab, and into the safety of collections.

So slowly but surely, I am working around it, kind of hoping to run into something exciting along the way. At the same time, if nothing shows up, the jacketing process will be a lot easier because I will only be working around one thing!



 All that being said, I really had a good time working in the lab today. I'm down to the point on this where I am having to use a sharp, point dental pick, one that has a straight point for accuracy rather than a sharp edge to scrape everything. The teeth are coming clean slowly but surely, and it turns out that there are a couple that are intact. There are also a couple of fragments (we call this float) in the sandstone that don't go with a tooth and are probably from the tooth to the left of the furthest left tooth, because there is a root and the very base of a tooth there left from one that broke off. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be enough pieces to reassemble it. Regardless, the part I do have is pretty cool. From the teeth, Mike and Rick think we may be able to tell the age, species, and even gender of the rhino that it is from. I'm excited. At this point, there is just a little more clean up to do on the teeth, and we'll go from there. I may even be able to finish that part tomorrow morning if we don't have to work irregular shifts. After that, I'm not really sure what the plan is, but I'll find out soon enough!

1 comment:

  1. AnonymousJune 17, 2014 at 7:34 AM

    I have been enjoying your blog, Emily. I wish you would post more often!

    ReplyDelete

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My Story (Very briefly...)

Lots of people claim that they wanted to be paleontologists at the age of 3. So did I. The problem is, I never really grew out of it. My third birthday party had dinosaurs. Everywhere. I grew up digging in fossil dirt from Aurora, NC, looking for coral and shark teeth. I practically lived at my local science museums (and still do, only now I get to do research, fossil preparation, and work in collections!) When local paleontologists discovered a dinosaur with a "fossilized heart" (no longer considered such) when I was little, I got to meet the man who led the work. And then, years later a dinosaur bone with soft tissue turned up. I was officially hooked.
No longer was I dreaming about dinosaurs. I was actively pursuing the science behind prehistoric creatures. I didn't want to read about it, I wanted in on the action. So I started working at the museum, and finally going on my own adventures. And thus, I needed a place to share them and maybe inspire others the way I was inspired. I have gone from watching fossils be prepared from one side of the glass at the museum to working on them on the inside of the glass. I am a student working toward my goal. I can finally start to call myself a paleontologist.