Sunday, June 1, 2014

The results are in!





Personally, I think I did ok on fixing this guy. Can you see the place where the tooth broke? No? Exactly. Rick had to hold it up to a light and really know where to look to even begin to see the crack, and he was happy with how it turned out. I just had to remove a little bit of excess B-15, and tomorrow this little fellow is going back to the discovery station.

No finds yet over in my part of the rhino barn, at least no bone ones. However, Ethan found a bit of a musk deer (saber-toothed deer) jaw. There are remains of this little guy spread out over a pretty large portion of the fossil bed. Some scavenger really had a time playing with this little guy. What, does the idea of a saber-toothed deer sound a little crazy? I know. We were joking today that those teeth will reveal that, rather than it being a browser, it really ate meat, attacking in small packs like the 'compies' in Jurassic Park, killing its prey with its tiny sabers...

Alright, enough of the bad horror fiction. In reality, they would have eaten leaves, and the sabers were possibly sexually dimorphic. Today, their descendants live in southeastern Asia. And yes, they still have those tusks. And before anyone has nightmares, yes, they really do eat leaves and moss and things that you don't have to chase down in packs and kill.

Fun fact: they told me before I came here that the material was really soft and easy to work with. And yet, ironically, what is the area I'm working in like? About as hard as cement sometimes. Again with the oddities...

And yet another oddity: bad weather rarely hits here, they said. The storms pass right by us, they said. And then it got windy and rainy and I found myself running with Patrick to close the doors in the Rhino Barn so that the Ash wouldn't blow everywhere and get into everyone's lungs. The ash is actually still potentially dangerous when the wind picks up like that. And at one point before we got to the doors a very impressive ash cloud got kicked up. It was very shiny from the tiny shards of glass that make up ash.

At least here, when you're running, you aren't running to tents that may not actually be there anymore. Once you get inside and get everything shut, you're basically as safe as you can be. Plus, the rain trapped several visitors in the Rhino Barn for a longer period of time, meaning they had longer to ask questions and absorb the information. There are advantages to the set up of this place.

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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.