Tracking Dinosaurs, ?? Maybe.

The Dakota sandstone is located at the very top of the Cedar Mountain formation.  It is the remnants of the shoreline as the inland sea rose during the mid part of the Cretaceous. 

It is a sandstone/conglomerate mix and sometimes yields fossils of wood and some bone.

 It is in this ancient shoreline one of the local residents from Emery County found some tracks. 

They were originally thought to be hoof prints and they do resemble them.  But this is the Cretaceous and as far as we know hooved animals did not exist during this time.

 We believe them to be two-toed tracks of what, we don’t know.  I am not aware of any two-toed skeletons having been found during the time of the dinosaurs.  This is great, fun! I love finding new stuff.  So, we decided to mold a few so we could share the fun.

 

Last Wednesday (9/14) Bill and I gathered us our supplies and visited the site. It is about 40 minutes away near Cedar Mountain.  We had some soft rigid foam used by podiatrists for foot impressions and some silicone.  We had no experience using the foam but thought this would be a good opportunity to try it.  The silicone we have used on a couple occasions before and we have had good success with it.

 cleaning out most of the tracks we chose two likely candidates to work on. 

  The pictures show how we pressed the foam into the tracks.  We chose tracks with no undercuts and we were able to remove the foam without damaging the foam cast.  Cleanup was easy, we just used a brush and the little bit of foam left on the rock turned to powder and blew away.

 For the silicone we sprayed on a biodegradable release so the silicone would remove easily when set. 

 After applying the silicone we went back to our vehicle and ate lunch. When we returned the silicone had set up and it came out with ease.

 

 After gathering up our equipment and cleaning the area we returned to the lab and poured plaster over our molds to test how well we did.  The casts turned out well.  Hopefully in the future I would like to map the tracks at this site and do a few more molds.

 It’s a hard job but somebody has to do it.  

End of Another Year at Suarez

The smoke was thick in the air from forest fires west of us in Utah and in Southern California but Bill and I headed out to Suarez. We had a pubis that had been discovered on the previous trip that we needed to get out before we closed the quarry for the season. We thought maybe the smoke would dissipate before we reached Green River but it was still so thick that we could not see the mountains back of Green River.

When we reached the trailhead, the smoke was still thick and we hiked with our equipment up to the site, our lungs hurting a little from the smoke in the air. Fortunately, within the hour, the wind shifted and the smoke began to clear and the mountains were again visible and we could breathe.

We removed overburden from above the pubis and Bill began working around the fossil to enable us to jacket it for removal. I worked a couple of meters away. The bones in this area are very abundant. I refer to it as the spaghetti bowl. The bones overlap each other and are so close together it makes excavation very difficult. It’s like excavating spaghetti.

On our previous trip, I had found a very nice ilium to a therizinosaur and was trying to work around it so that I could remove it. In the process, I uncovered a couple dozen other fossil bones that we recorded and mapped before I was able to remove the ilium from its resting place. After all of this was removed I found a layer of armor from the nodosaur. These will have to wait until next year.

Earlier this year, we recovered a lower jaw from a therizinosaur. Several of the teeth were still in place. This is the largest jaw we have recovered from this site and I just thought you might like to see it. The teeth are spatulate in shape, very unusual for a theripod. This is one of the main reasons we believe this animal was an omnivore. Its claws are still very sharp and lethal so at least at this stage of their evolution they are thought to eat some meat as well as plants.

When we finished we covered the exposed bones with burlap and pulled some of the overburden onto the burlap. This will keep the quarry in good shape until we return next year. This year we have spent many a great night stargazing and at one time, we were able to see the space station and the shuttle before the shuttle was docked. The Milky Way is beautiful on moonless nights and we were able to see satellites, meteors, and planes as they go by.

We are looking forward to preparing out the specimens collected this year and further excavations and stargazing next year.