FINALLY

 Almost three months after I started in my square, Rick decided he wanted everyone to team up with picks and shovels and attack one of the ledges that are around the perimeter of the ashbed. They are cemented ash, but they needed to come down.

So, down they came!

Recovery zone quarry before clean up

Well, tearing walls down creates a lot of dust. So a week later (that is, today) Rick took a broom to the loose ash that now plagued the area and swept it up. He then asked me to collect the piles and take them to the skid loader, and maybe clean up the quarry we have going up in the recovery zone so that people can actually see the sand-covered bones from the balcony instead of just seeing the labels. And even a couple of those had gotten too dirty to read.

So, I picked up a brush, scoop, and buckets and set to work.

Recovery zone quarry after clean up

My goal has been to finish my square (-ish) area before I leave here in a week. There are still some disarticulated bones that need to be pedastooled, and one area where the sand is basically at the surface that I would like to see cleaned off. So to me, being asked to side track from this a little bit was... not the most exciting thing in the world. But it did need to be done, and I do like seeing the barn actually presentable. There's some amount of pride in helping to keep a place looking nice, whether that is making your hole in the ground into something a little more uniform and quarry-like or brushing off the fossils for folks to see.

I mean, you have to admit, after removing two and a half buckets of sand, the recovery zone quarry does look a LOT better. You can see every crack in the elephant femur, every tooth (except for one that was missing) in the rhino jaw, and even some bones that just couldn't be seen easily before. And the area in the ash that I was sweeping off looked a lot nicer, too.

And besides that, I enjoyed working up in the recovery zone a bit. I noticed little details in how some of the bones were broken and the wear of the teeth that I had learned were diagnostic of how they broke and how old the animal was, and to me it was just fun to rebuild what they had been from in this way mentally.


But this was the most exciting part.

You hear the difference, we tell people, though it is hard to describe. Brush, brush, brush, kink, brush....wait. That sound...

Yes. That is a bone sticking out of the ash layer that I was sweeping off. However, I was under the impression that we weren't exploring this area any further until next summer, so I marked it, took a picture, and went up for lunch and to show Rick what had popped up. It was amazing that the picks didn't destroy it, but it looks intact. There are some bone shards below it as well. I then went back to work, finally getting started on that recovery layer that I already showed you pictures of. After a while Rick came up to see how I was doing.  "So the next time you're in the barn, why don't you expose the surface of that bone.... it looks like a humerus or a femur, but its a weird shape so I'm not sure what it's from."

Wait. Back up.

I get to work on my bone. Aside from fragments and my horned rodent tooth, that's my first one all summer. Not a bad reward for being willing to do the less exciting job today. I had just heard Rick explaining to a visitor that paleontology is only boring if you don't enjoy it. ...oh, I was already enjoying. I don't have words for this anymore.

The way it is facing, if there is any more it will be the rest of the leg and maybe the foot, but it is so high up in the ash that I'm expecting it to be an isolated bone. That being said, that would be a sign of scavenging, and I am sort of hoping for some teeth marks at least. Maybe, if I'm lucky, there will be something pathological there.

So tomorrow, I finally get to start diggin' up bones. Excited? Yes. Admittedly I've been bouncing off of the walls ever since he said I could work on it. 

Disclaimer: no fossils were harmed in the process of this bouncing.