"That was YOU?"
Let's just say I surprised her a bit when I mentioned those days. She had a bigger influence on my life then than she ever realized, and that was really the transition for me from being a childhood lover of dinosaurs to actively pursuing the field. When she left, I got involved in prep work at the museum, leading eventually to me meeting Dr. Zanno and eventually ending up back at NCSU. There, I'm treated very much like a grad student, and still find my way into labs relatively frequently.
Part of the reason that I chose the job I did this summer was to be close to Rangely, Colorado, and be able to go out in the field for a few days with her. That was partly because I was excited to find out that she had recovered enough to get back into paleontology and teach at CNCC, but also because she's using slightly different collecting methods from what I've learned in the past.
See, they found what they think is a (very large) hadrosaur, standing about ten feet. Big, old fella. There is a lot of articulation and there are even smaller bones, such as the toes. Most of him may be there, and there are even skin-like structures. It might add to the number of dinosaur mummies. The site is in the Mesaverde Formation, dating to roughly 74 million years old.
Because of the exceptional preservation, Dr. Schweitzer and her students have an interest in the site. Any time preservation is this nice, there stands a chance of them being able to do molecular paleontology testing on it. Which means the field work has to be a little different. The second that something new is exposed, samples had to be collected with gloves from everywhere. Those samples then have to be kept in jars and away from water.We couldn't take food or water down to the site (though plenty was kept nearby, away from the fossils but where we could get to it easily.) We also didn't use consolidates (glues) unless absolutely needed, because they are carbon based and would drown out the signals chemically of anything biomolecular left.
The problem? This was a big, big dinosaur.So we had a problem.
This is the smaller of two large jackets that we plastered and had to get back to the college.
Likely, this thing weighs about 200 pounds. And there were 6 of us, two with injuries and none extremely strong. Not to be sexist, but most of us were female, and that wasn't exactly helping.
Neither did the fact that this was the hill that the jacket had to get up. Acutally, it was taller than this, but this is the part that had "steps" that we were able to fill in with sand and turn in to a soft ramp.
That was great for the fossil and awful for those of us who needed footing to get it up.
But we did it.It took about three hours plus the time that went into preparation and planning, but we did it.
You see, we couldn't lift the weight, and the boards that we tried to make a carrying harness with cracked the second we did get it off the ground. So that didn't work. However, we did have ratchet straps. So we did something crazy/awesome. Liz wrapped one all the way around the jacket, hooked others to that one, and handed the others of us each one. She then lifted it with a crow bar as we pulled, sticking wood underneath it each time so that we wouldn't lose progress. Slowly but surely, we rolled it up the hill. Over, and over, and over, and three hours later it was up. Hopefully the bones held up in the jacket. I'm sure they're fine, they were big and the jacket was thick, and well supported. The engineering that goes into paleontology is amazing. I mean, the methods that went into making a field jacket were developed from years of trial and error. We're problem solvers. That's a skill that we don't go to school for; we learn it from our mentors when we go into the field, and that takes time. Just like getting the jacket up did. But we did it, and we do it.
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