On the Road Again!

Or I suppose I should say, in the air again....

For anyone who hasn’t heard yet, I’m interning at Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry this summer. Starting tomorrow, I will be working a job that I had to get federal clearance for, giving tours and doing paleontology and education work at the quarry. The site is in the Morrison formation, a section of Jurassic rock in the Midwest famous for the sauropods and therapods that it has revealed since its discovery.

Particularly famous is Dinosaur National Monument. The layer was discovered by Douglas in 1909. It’s no longer excavated, as there is very little of it left after it was subjected to the race to get the most and best fossils back in the day, but what is left of it in the wall, and exposed for the public to see and ooh and ah over. 

And it is ooh and ah worthy. In one place, there is a sauropod skull, fully articulated, sticking out of the wall with several neck vertebrae still attached. There are also articulated feet, tails, legs, you name it, throughout the wall. It is the site of the discovery of one of the only known juvenile stegosaurs, and also the home of multiple sauropod (particularly one discovered locally called Abydosaurus) and therapod species found there first. In theory, the site formed in a particularly thick layer as a result of all of the carcasses represented here packing together into a "log jam" and "damming the river." This is why there is only some articulation present.  I had the privilege of visiting with my father when I was in high school right after the building was renovated.

I'm a little freaked out by my cell phone, by the way. I'm slowly getting accustomed to technology knowing a little more than it should. This morning my phone decided to inform me that it was time to leave home in order to catch my flight, providing me with the driving route, my departure time, traffic information, hotels I could stay in on arriving.... you name it, and Google was showing off that it knew it. I didn't set a reminder, all I did was receive an email with my flight information.

Too much, Google. Too much.

Anyway, I'm done being creeped out now, let's talk about something interesting. Like paleontology.

So apparently I have a knack for finding fossils where fossils shouldn't be. For example, I ran into a little jewelry store in the BWI airport while killing time before my flight that had what I'm pretty sure were casts of a Mesosaur, fish, and a few other flat fossils. They unfortunately did not allow me to take pictures. What really caught my interest this time, however, was the case labeled amber. This is a pretty normal and acceptable thing to find in jewelry stores. What amazed me though was the color.

It was green.

Yes, you read that right. Not orange. Green.

Apparently its about a fifth of the age of the amber that we're used to seeing and found at a different site from a different species of tree. At first, I thought it may be copal, a common 'pseudo-amber' that is less valuable, younger, and not completely hardened yet. Generally its tacky to the touch. However, on holding this piece, it was solid. I retreated to my phone and found out through some research that, not only was this legitimate (coming in at 10 million years old), but there is also a really pretty blue variety from yet a different locality. Even rarer, and again a different age... I've never seen anything like it.

Ok. Moving on to vertebrates before I talk myself into going back and spending an arm and a leg on that. 

So let's talk about this place that I'm crazy enough to go across the country to work at.

I have actually been there once. The year that I went out with Dr. Lindsay Zanno and NCSU (two summers ago) we were relatively close to the site. As she actually worked there early on (as did her then-future husband, I believe...), we took a day off from digging to go see it.  It isn't fully understood how it formed, but as I stated before, it is in the Morrison formation. It's approximately 156 million years old, give or take a few.

I know more about what isn't known about the site than what is. It poses this problem of being predominately carnivores (why can't I ever work somewhere that seems ecologically sound...?) The site represents an assemblage of Allosaurus, and finding an explanation for the assemblage has proven interesting. Flooding, drought, disease, and starvation have all been suggested, but so far there is more evidence for what couldn't have possibly happened than for a definitive idea of what did. Kind of messy. Should be fun.

CLDQ, (Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry) here I come :)