Friday, July 18, 2014

Tracing a trace fossil (hopefully toward more exciting things.)

See the ovular sandy shape in the middle? That is a carnivore burrow. There is no question that this is a carnivore burrow. And it's a big one, too. At first, there was hope of finding the actual carnivore in here!

...well, as time went on and I started to actually dig down into the burrow, it went from bear dog size to maybe raccoon dog size, and it's continuing to shrink. That said, it can only shrink so much more because I am about 6 inches from the sand layer, based on my previous square that is next to me. If anything is below me, its going to be either flat, scavenged, or pretty small. Plus, I hit cemented ash (hard ash caused by clay mixing into the ash layer), which rarely has fossils. But I am still digging in to it with some hope left, mapping the as the size changes as I go down. I did have one bone fragment.

According to Rick, it has just been a bit of an unlucky season for finding bone. You just have some of those once in while. Just our luck we will start finding skeletons at the very end.

Why dig into the burrow?

Carnivores near the catastrophe would have smelled the rotting meat buried in the ash (remember, these fossilized bones did once have animals attached to them, with muscles and organs and such), attracted large and small animals with sharp, pointy teeth. And very few carnivores will turn down an easy meal just because it is beyond a little ripe. Less energy to catch it means more energy that can be stored for later, which is always a plus. And as fast as the herbivores were dying from the ash (they had their faces in it 8-10 hours a day grazing and thus would've died faster than the carnivores. Meat is more filling, I continually tease my vegetarian roommate about, not to mention apparently better for your health, seeing as the herbivores died first. Kidding, kidding....), Ashfall would've been a smelly, overripe, squishy party for the carnivores in the area. Yum, rotten, raw steaks.

Oh well. They weren't picky. Despite not having any bone evidence of the carnivores in the ash bed, we see their burrows, coprolites (translation, fossilized poop), tracks, teeth, teeth marks, and what seems to be what we call vomit-ite (see if you can figure that one out...) We're still looking though!

So I keep digging. Maybe tomorrow will yield bone. Or maybe I'll hit the bottom of the watering hole again.

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.