Tuesday, August 12, 2014

"Whatcha makin'?"

 That was a common way in one field I worked in to ask "what did you find?" Although we aren't actually the ones who design the bones we find, sometimes it does feel like they are being carved out of rock.

Believe me, I'm not that great of an artist. But I did find something kind of cool.

I have a full rhino (adult) femur!! And it is well above the layer that the bones are normally in, which implies scavenging. It has a few cracks in it from where the rock above it was attacked with a pick or shovel, but its still pretty stable as far as bones go.  I couldn't really see any evidence of the Marie's disease on this one (I was really hoping I would...) but it's still pretty cool.

And then there were the bone shards sticking out of the hill. It turns out they weren't just bone shards. There are at least three horse (?) ribs going in multiple directions (again, probably scavenging) and unlike the femur they just kind of like to explode when you even dare to look at them wrong. Ok, that is a little bit of an exaggeration, but they really did not want to stay intact despite my best efforts.

Thankfully, I don't think they get any longer, so I can probably go ahead and consolidate them the next time I get to work on them. I may do something with the cracks in that femur too, just to keep them from getting worse. We have a really thin glue that we use for such things.

You know, I really do love my job. I love it so much that it's really rarely tedious or frustrating or boring. But honestly, aside from dealing with that one in a million crazy visitor and cleaning bathrooms, this is the only thing about it that gets to me; when no matter what you do, everything just falls into a million unsalvagable pieces. It wears me out probably more than trying to keep up with my professor back home hiking to various field sites last summer at a mile higher elevation than my lungs were used to. But it does feel really good to be able to get things cleaned up and in a finished, presentable state.

My time here is almost done. The grade schoolers in this area have started school, and I'm about to in a week. I may not finish my square, but I can finally say I found bone.

Speaking of my square, there was something that we thought was a bone fragment that I pedastooled only to find out today that it is a very bone-filled scavenger's coprolite. That means fossil poop. This one is stable enough that we were able to remove it though, and these are actually being held on to. After all, they're part of the story.

Now I've just got to take down that pedastool.

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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.