Getting Plastered Paleo Style

Price River 2 has been waiting patiently for our attention this year, and we finally made it out to excavate some more bones from this long-time site. The PR2 site is multi-layered. The top layer produces mostly brachiosaur bones of which we have identified 7 individuals so far and the lower layer has a mixture of brachiosaur and nodosaur. The nodosaur, an armored dinosaur is my favorite. He is like a 30 foot long horned toad.

This week we were concentrating our efforts on the upper layer where the brachiosaur is. Tuesday, Craig Royce and Bill and I were able to trench around some of the bones and apply a plaster jacket.

The jackets consist of strips of burlap soaked in plaster and then wrapped around the pedestal bones to hold them together for the journey back to the lab. We first apply either toilet paper or paper towels as a separator to keep the plaster from sticking to the bones. The trenching process to pedestal the bones can be tedious because usually during this process we find more bones and sometimes pedestaling one bone is like trying to pedestal one noodle of spaghetti in a massive pasta plate.

Wednesday a small crew of naive high school students accompanied us into the field. First thing we did was loosen one of the finished jackets we had made the day before and turned it over and removed it from the quarry. This opened up a previously inaccessible side of two other bones we had partially jacketed and a third bone, an ischium, we were trenching around to jacket. The heat of the day was taking its toll on everyone but especially on our high school volunteers.
Bill and one of our volunteers were able to jacket the ischium after which we broke for lunch. Everyone had Gatorade and plenty of water but three out of our four students were done in and were having lack of energy issues after lunch.

We packed up a little early and headed back to town. The air conditioning in the vehicles helped, and the thought of a dip in the wave pool in Price energized them and they began perking up. And that’s how it is when you get plastered in the field.