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.
A large part of paleontology isn't just the digging or the research or the prep work. Equally important is prospecting, or going out and looking for where fossils are eroding out of the hills. Sometimes people lead us to things they found hiking, but other times we go look for things in rock exposures from time periods that we're interested in. In the case of Cleveland-Lloyd, we were trying to figure out where dinosaur bone is exposed so that we know what's near the visitors.
We each got to spend most of a day walking around the grounds and looking at Jurassic exposures for anything interesting.
Well, I didn't come across bone, which actually in this case was a plus. In the process, I did find some really interesting geologic features, such as slickened slide, and some really deep dewatering cracks. In one case, there were dewatering cracks like those from short track that had been polished into slickened slide on the surface. I was hoping this layer would hold another track, but no such luck. That said, its one more exposure of the layer and one more place that tracks could erode out. One more spot to keep an eye on.
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