Snakes, Bones and High School Students

We started from the Museum of the San Rafael in Castle Dale Utah. Nine students, five leaders. After checking out the great displays at the museum, we headed south into the Mussentuchit area where our Eolambia 2 (EO2) site is. The weather was great, just a bit on the warm side, with a slight breeze to keep the bugs down.

While setting up camp, I heard several shouts to come and see. So I grabbed my camera and headed down into the camp area.

A rattle snake had been found by one of the participants and since no one wanted him for a tent mate we decided to relocate the snake. Using a shovel and a burlap bag, we coaxed the snake into the burlap bag and carried him some distance from the camp where he was released.

With camp set up we packed up some gear and headed down to the dig site. We had a gas powered generator and an electric jackhammer that we used to remove some of the overburden.

After an hour or a little more we were able to clear off the bone bed and begin excavating dinosaur bones for a short time before dinner.

After dinner we visited an ancient Indian campsite and saw some petroglyphs left there by the early campers. Lithic scatter covered the ground of the camp area where ancient artisans had been working with a chert.

Tuesday we were able to excavate all day long and recorded mapped and removed forty plus bones from the site.

Wednesday I got up early (at my usual time) and headed down to the site while the crew was getting up and having their breakfast. I worked on removing some more overburden, and was very successful, because the sandstone layer above the site loosened from the vibration of the jackhammer and came down just after I stepped out of the way and avoided disaster. The other participants arrived and using the jackhammer, after we unburied it, whittled the larger chunks of sandstone into manageable pieces and had the bone bed cleared off once more.

We closed up the quarry early that day in order to get the supply truck back to the museum in Price so the personnel there could unload it. The rest of us went on an expedition to the eggshell site and collected some eggshell and turtle shell from that site for study back at the College of Eastern Utah in Price.

Thursday we broke camp early and headed out for a day studying the geology of the area. We played on the sand dunes for a while, looked at dikes and sills that are abundant in that area, studied folds and faults, saw great vistas and dinosaur tracks and ended up back at the Museum of the San Rafael.

Friday we spent at the lab in Price working at preparing some of the bones we had collected for study. Everyone had a great time, new friendships were made and old friendships had been renewed.

Blown Away Again!

Tuesday, we loaded up the suburban, Bill Casey and me, and don’t forget Sage, off to explore new territory in the Mussentuchit Area. The weather was great, a little cool, a little breeze, sunny. We made it to our starting point about ten o’clock or ten thirty. We ate an early lunch, took a little food and lots of water with us and dropped off the cliff down onto the site in the Cedar Mountain Formation. Only a short time later, we began finding bone. It was mostly fragments and unidentifiable.

Persistence paid off and we found the site with some good bone in it. It was another Eolambia. We were hoping for crocodile or a theropod of some sort. We uncovered a humerus, an upper arm bone, a predentary, an 'extra' bone in the front of the lower jaw, and a fibula, one of the lower leg bones, and an assortment of bone fragments. We collected all but the tibia, photographed and recorded the site. The wind had been increasing in strength as the day went on and just after I handed Bill a scale, (a laminated marker) to hold by the bone and the wind gusted and blew the scale out of his hand never to be seen again. Fortunately, I had more that one. We then moved on looking for more sites.

We crossed the valley to the other site. Casey and Bill went up the hill while I stayed down in the lower area. We worked our way around to where we could see over the hill and could figure out where we were in relation to other sites in the area. Our water was beginning to run low and the wind was picking up and we had a ways to walk back to the suburban so we called it a day.

Back at the suburban, we rested a bit after our climb up the hill and headed off to find ourselves a good campsite with some protection from the wind. We camped in some boulders that night that afforded some protection and when morning dawned, the wind had subsided. A cold front had moved through and the temperatures had dropped a little.

The next morning we ate a good breakfast and headed back to cover some territory we had not been to yet. The walk in was up a long, sloping hill to where we could drop into the valley that we were surveying. We found a USGS (United States Geological Survey) marker. Many of these were surveyed in the 1930’s and later in the early 1950’s quarter section markers were added. This one was a quarter section marker surveyed in 1951. I like to GPS (Global Positioning System) these markers. This helps me when I am mapping locations and routes that we have traveled. As we began surveying, we found very little bone but we did find some wood. The wood tells us what type of plants grew during that time period and gives us clues as to the climate. And finally, we found our first bone site of the day.

The bone was brown which is unusual for the area we were in. All of the other bone sites, the bone has been black. The day has been beautiful so far and warming up a bit to a more comfortable temperature with a breeze blowing. The previous day, Casey had found a piece of petrified wood and we wanted to GPS its location, so we headed back to that area. The wind began picking up and became very strong and we finally decided to leave that wood for another day because the wind was blowing so hard we were having trouble walking and the wood was near the edge of a cliff.

We decided to cover another hill that was nearby and although the wind was very strong we were able to work around it locating a site with vertebrae scattered on the surface. Fragments from other bones were also visible on the surface. Poor Sage was so tired she laid down and went to sleep while we were photographing and recording this site. We left all the bones at the site. If we decide to excavate this site, we will collect them later. Other sites were found on that same hill. The afternoon was beginning to grow short and we were running out of time so we headed back towards the suburban. Bill was telling one of his snake stories, and he happened to spot a bull snake, we stopped and took a couple of pictures and a little video and said goodbye to our friend, continuing back to the suburban.

We arrived back at the suburban a little after three o’clock. We ate and rested for a few minutes and then headed back to the museum. On our way back, we passed through the small town of Emery and found that we were not the only ones experiencing wind. As we passed the park, we looked over and saw a large Navajo Globe Willow Tree that had been uprooted by the wind and was sadly laying on its side. Looks like we weren’t the only things that were blown away!

Getting High with Paleo Dude

This week has been very busy. Tuesday, we brought up a mold we made a few years back of the bones in situ (in place). We made a cast of the mold and the cast was used as a part of the front of the Mesozoic Gardens Exhibit. We used WEP (water emulsified polyester), fortunately we did this outside in fresh air so we didn’t get too high!

Wednesday, we went out to the Swarez Site near Green River Utah. The day started out beautiful, a bit overcast, great working weather. We reestablished the grid for mapping the bones as they are excavated and we started some excavation when a cold front hit and we were rained out. The ride out was slippery in spots and my companions promised me a two scoop ice cream cone if I got them out without sliding off the road. The ice cream was good.

We had planned on staying overnight at Swarez, but instead, we had to suffer in our own comfortable beds. The next day we headed down into the San Rafael Swell where the road crosses the San Rafael River is the historical site of Swinging Bridge. We followed the road east from the campground area and into Red Canyon. The ground was moist from the storm and the weather was cool, another perfect day for hiking.

The rain caused the colors to intensify and the area was beautiful.

Wild flowers were blooming.

We hiked up the mountain along the way passing naturally sculptured sandstone boulders of various shapes and sizes found in the Chinle Formation.

Chinle is known for its abundance of petrified wood and the petrified forest in Arizona is a great example. The wood in this part of the Chinle is not as colorful but still can be attractive. The wood was abundant and we wanted to find the layer it was weathering out from. That afternoon, we hiked up the hillside to a large sandstone layer and finally found wood in situ.We found four logs from ten inches in diameter to fourteen inches in diameter still in the sandstone. The sandstone at the bottom had some cross-bedding indicating water movement such as a river. We worked our way down with samples we had collected and headed back out.

By this time blue sky was around us with beautiful white clouds as a backdrop for the beautifully sculptured landscape. We had been blessed with another very successful field trip. At the end of the movie Hook, Peter Pan (Robin Williams) said to live is a great adventure, and so it is.