Kind of.
Maybe...
OK. Not at all, no.
You see, back home, one of my professors and the graduate students in paleontology left for their slightly late and short 2014 field season yesterday, driving across the country to the wonderful, mucky, hot, dry Mussentuchit in the Utah desert, where they'll be camping out and doing the hard-core type of field work that we did last summer. Who would ever miss having a tent that didn't close, storms every night, scorpions in your tent, and working ridiculously hard to find fragments of dinosaur bone?
Actually.... that would be me. We call it the field bug.
Well, every year, Ashfall hosts the friend's dig, which basically means that anyone who gives money to the museum has the chance to go out into the 'field' (a neighboring ranch) and dig for fossils (without using a pick, shovel, or even doing their own mapping or prospecting) for a day (while leaving at lunch to go to the local cafe and going home at the end of the day and being free to dig or not dig as they choose), and maybe even help make a jacket when they (undoubtedly) find a bone (in a very fossiliferous quarry.) It's... sort of like field work.
And yet, it was a day outside in the sun, enjoying the breeze when it came and staying hydrated when it didn't. There was no tent, no propane stove that tried to blow off your eyebrows whenever you lit it, no jackhammer that barely worked, no lugging 50 pounds of gear for at least a mile up a hill with rocks falling out from under your feet, no running from the looming storms....
Man, I really know how to sell this field work thing.
Anyway, despite there being none of that (and barely even enough time to get sun burnt or dehydrated as each intern only spent half of a day out there), it just felt good to be on the side of a mountain in the desert again. Er.... this time it was a cow pasture. But I had my hat, so life was good!
So I have established that this is barely 'true' field work. This is the kind of fluffy field work that we let people from the outside try while still giving us minimum liability.But all the same, it wasn't in the Rhino Barn. It was outside in the fresh air, with people laughing and in good spirits whether they found something or not.
It didn't exactly cure me of the field bug, but it at least put a bit of a bandage over it. I mean, come on.... I found a bunch of something (smaller bones that are going to be quite a puzzle but will definitely fit together into one) and then had just enough time to help with some of the detail work on the find of a more nervous member.The field work here is slightly different than I've done before. Rick wanted me to find the extent of the bone without actually exposing anything. That.... felt really risky, but I managed!
At first, it was just a flat piece of bone that the woman I was working near and helping had been sitting on. I took a look at it and remember one little trick that Dr. Zanno taught me last summer; the most complex bones are skull and vertebrae. Most of the other bones are simple. And I knew this one was complicated (this has to do with patterns on the bone and the shape of the bone.) Because of the piece we had, I thought vertebrae, but as we uncovered more, it got too long and.... and then teeth showed up.Jaw. Rhino jaw, to be exact.
Here we go again. Just like I started with this year in the prep lab.
Someone else also found a skull. This was as much as they uncovered... it will be plastered and cleaned up better in the lab. But there is enough to know that a good portion of the skull is there. This is the back of it. It is upside down. So.... flip it over and turn it 180 degrees in your head. There you go. Skull!Anyway, fossils are great, but so is knowing a little bit more about their context. You know, where they came from, how they got there...
The site was originally named for the turtle that was found there first during prospecting, but as more of it was explored and it was shown to be a really good site, it came to have an actual field number
These fossils... well, they aren't in ash, so we can't actually give and exact date just yet until we find more fossils that will help us to narrow it down, but we know that it is younger than Ashfall (roughly nine million years old is the current best estimate). There are no complete skeletons here, but it is still a pretty cool site. The fossils are preserved in what seems like sandstone at first glance, but it is really, really soft and actually an equal mix of clay, silt, and sandstone.
And when a mix like that gets wet, it is the perfect recipe for a good ol' batch of quicksand.
Alright, so today, it's a little bit more solid, but when Mike said that, I had to get down and try it. A little bit of water, a chunk of the material, and sure enough, it feels like the kind of mud that would suck a large animal into its grasps. Don't worry, no one sank in the process of my little experiment.
Interestingly enough, there are no smaller animals in this fossil bed, probably because they would be able to scurry right across it.
So I still miss the field a little bit, but at least this will hold me over until the next trip with the fossil club, and hopefully a couple of those will hold me over until whatever adventures next summer brings. For now, its back to the ash bed and our finds there (because yes folks, there was finally a find. But you'll have to wait for a later post to hear about it.)
Besides, the funny stories that come from museum work help immensely! For example, Jeremy let the paper towel roll get away from him in the wind one day and it came undone completely. Well, he got sent to clean the bathrooms and I got left to roll it back up (actually, I prefer that to the bathrooms...) and of course Rick walks in and (jokingly) blames me for it. "It wasn't me! It was the other one!" I shouted back, laughing. And like a good boy, Sam was there when Rick (again jokingly) turned to blame him (seeing as Jeremy was conveniently not in his line of vision.)
Way to go, boys.
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