Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Have a happy holiday season and best wishes for 2009. I will blog again next year!

Never Been Lost (but there have been a few days I didn’t quite know where I was)

We’re still looking for new bone sites to excavate and a week ago, our travels took us southeast of Clawson Utah into another part of the San Rafael Swell. The Cedar Mountain is thin in this area but we were able to find a few bone scatters, some dinosaur eggshell and some more petrified wood in the Dakota.

The Dakota Formation caps the top of the Cedar Mountain and was formed when the Mancos Sea was expanding into North America during the Cretaceous period.

Some of the weathering patterns are very interesting so I snapped a few photos.

The petrified wood was in a log about 8’ long, a little less than 3 meters. Unfortunately, it was heavily broken up but the interesting thing about the wood is it had no rings. It had rays radiating out from the center to the outside. This characteristic most likely means that it isn’t a wood, but is more closely related to some type of fern or cycad. We may return next spring and try to remove a section and put it together to get a better picture of what it actually looked like.

Four of us participated on this survey, Marvin Evans, a long time friend and at one time, a co-worker, Lloyd Logan, our Director of Education, me and Bill Heffner, our lab assistant. Oh yes, and I can’t forget Sage, our fearless rock “hound”.

It’s fun walking around and discovering what’s in areas you have not been before. The time went quickly.

Of course, Marvin knew of another cool rock art panel in the area so on our way back to Price, we took a little side trip and checked out the rock art. It seems to me that in times past, other explorers may not have known quite where they were either, but like me, they certainly were not lost.