Farewell To An Old Friend

The week after the Chicago crew left, Bill and I (and Sage) spent two more days at the Suarez Site. On our way into the site, one of our old friends showed himself and posed for a few more pictures. This is the same ram we saw two weeks before. He seems to be staying in the same area. I hope we will see him next year.

We’ve now recovered more than 1,200 bones from this site and we finally found three articulated vertebrae. These vertebrae are from the middle of the tail of a therizinosaur and are interlocked by the neuro spines. Everything else we have found in the quarry has been dis-articulated and mixed in with other sizes of therizinosaur and nodosaur bones so we were anxious to recover three bones that were in the same position together as they were in life.
We had several other fossil bones that were left in the quarry after the when the Chicago crew left and we wanted to remove them before closing the quarry for the winter. The weather was great, the days in the upper 70’s and the nights in the mid 50’s. The stars were beautiful and the Milky Way was clear and sharp.

In closing up the quarry, we covered the few remaining exposed bones with burlap and then dirt and a few rocks. Both Bill’s and my pack’s were a little heavy because we were trying to pack everything out in one trip and for the most part, we did it. Bill made one extra trip up the hill to grab some buckets filled with tools I left at the top of the trail.

On our way home, we made our usual side trip into Green River and enjoyed an ice cream cone from the local coffee shop.

Last Wednesday, October 1st, Bill and I (and Sage) and a couple of students from the College of Eastern Utah, went to the Price River 2 (PR2) quarry. We jacketed one of the bones left there from a previous dig and removed the remaining bones, about eight. This was the first time in fifteen years of excavating at this site we did not leave a bone exposed for the next trip.

PR2 has produced more than 1,200 bones, the majority being brachiosaur, a medium sized sauropod. Nodosaur bones from two separate species have also been recovered. One of them we have just submitted the final draft of the paper to describe and name it. Sorry I can’t tell you the name at this time. You will have to wait until the paper is published. Ken Carpenter from Denver is the lead author with Jeff Bartlett, myself, and Reese Barrick as co-authors.

Over the fifteen years we have excavated at PR2, many friends, some now gone, have helped excavate the bones. Many great experiences and fun stories have come from the activities at this site. It will be hard not to be able to dig at this site. So I say good bye to an old friend.