TEETH!

Yep, I'm back. I had to hunt around a bit to find something to post about, but right when I was taking pictures for what I was going to post on (which has been postponed until next time), I came across something in the field jacket I've been working on. Frankly, the other post can wait and this is more exciting.

So in the lab, you try your absolute best to keep a flat surface and not to remove large chunks. This way you can see what you are doing and be relatively certain that you aren't demolishing whatever bone you can't see yet. But sometimes, rocks crack apart and no matter what you do they will fall out of the jacket.

So finally, you just gently get them out of the way. And that is how a jacket that could have taken several weeks finally revealed at least part of its secret to me.

Rule #1 here, we tell people: Don't get excited when you see bone. Don't jump up and down so you don't break anything, and call the boss.

"Rick, do you have a copy? This jacket has a rhino jaw, and there are teeth." (Whoo, radio talk.)

Just another fossil, right? Um, wrong. Teeth are really delicate sometimes, and in all my years I've never actually worked on teeth. We always avoid those back home and leave them to the professionals. This is also partially because they can be important to research; by scanning them, we can see bits of a meal or scratches on their teeth to indicate what they've been eating.

Well, um... here, the idea is to learn how to such things.

So far, the rules include "don't tunnel," "just expose the surface," and, as stated before, the all important Rule #1.

But rhino teeth are weird. Where exactly is the surface? Like they have ridges, kind of like horse or mammoth teeth, with multiple folds meant for grinding grass. I actually got to explain this to a very curious little aspiring paleontologist who stood outside the lab window watching me and Ellen for at least an hour. This also included pulling examples off the shelf, especially the casts that she could run a finger over and feel the difference. These teeth are designed to wear down in certain places faster than others, leaving behind ridges so that the teeth can be used longer. They are a good indicator of age as a result of this. It works about like with rodent teeth, and with the same reason of leaving behind a sharp edge, but the functions are different and they don't grow constantly like rodent teeth would. Browsers, meanwhile, have sharper, pointy teeth that almost look like those of a meat eater. I've heard people mistake Diplodocus as a meat eater as a result of this, but in reality his teeth aren't designed for ripping meat but leaves! Mastodon and deer teeth function similarly.

(Thank you, NCFC, for the privilege of helping with the terrestrial mammals chapter of the book that is being published soon. I actually had to learn a fair bit about teeth for that because they were one of the more common fossils in the chapter.)

There is at least one tooth and the root of another one. The fossil was near the surface, and is probably the color that it is as a result of oxidizing (same process as rusting. Animals have iron in their bodies.)

So I can finally tell people what this 9 million year old bone is rather than just showing them an empty jacket or chunk of bone.

By the end of her time watching, the little girl had decided that she wants to work here at Ashfall someday when she's in college. She is 9 years old. Ellen talked to her about school work, and I told her dad how finding experience somewhere (for example, at a museum)is more important than the grades. Another generation of paleontologists is born.