Saturday, July 5, 2014

Just the way the cookie crumbles

Generally, this would have been really exciting. I finished the fossil I had been working on, I set it aside, and I was given a new field jacket to work on!

 The problem is that this jacket wasn't exactly new. In fact, it is a fairly flimsy jacket from the original National Geographic quarry, probably the 1979 field season, that from the looks of all of the loose pieces has been dropped at least once during transport (UNL's fossil storage has moved a time or two over the years, if I understand correctly.)

 Even though the purpose of a field jacket is to protect a fossil, it can only do so much against the forces of gravity and sudden impact. I think every time I took a little brush to it, another fragment fell away from nowhere, with no piece that it had been attached to anytime recently. So just a lot of fragments. We think that the original paleontologist had been trying to jacket a series of vertebrae that were eroding out of the hill side (evidenced by the sandy color in the ash), but time has not been kind to this fossil. 

 This is a fairly common problem in paleontology; many early jackets from the days of Cope and Marsh still sit in museum collections, waiting to be uncovered by someone in the lab, and the longer they are exposed to changing temperatures and a slight amount of air that works its way into the jackets, the more brittle they become. And dropping it doesn't help. A lot of these jackets don't come out looking too nice.

 Our goal right now is to clean the pieces up a bit, fix what we can (which won't be much) and with any luck salvage at least one, maybe two, remaining vertebrae that are in slightly solider matrix (in this case, more compacted ash.)

 A quick not for clarity: remember, none of the fossils are being removed from the Rhino Barn. This fossil was taken out from a different quarry several yards away from the building before a building even existed, near where the first rhino jaw was found. This area is still marked by red flags today for visitors to see our progress.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

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.