Weather: A roller coaster: windy, windy, windy in the first half of the day with sun and temperatures starting at 45 and heating up to 67. Overcast skies and sideways rain in the late afternoon, with temperatures dipping to 52, and then, by 8 p.m., raising again to 57. Go figure.
Breakfast: The usual.
Lunch: Leftover tortellini; cold-cut sandwiches; chips
Dinner: Grilled pork chops, mashed potatoes, stuffing with gravy, buttermilk biscuits, corn, salad, and brownies for dessert. We're not kidding; this is really what Nikki made tonight. She should open a restaurant.
Synopsis: The day began with hydrology. In two places, the road to the quarry had grown two lakes from the night's rain. The crew started with shovels, digging drainage on the road and on the specimen, bailing water from the low points. They also removed the tarps to let everything dry out, and then mucked mud. Finally, we applied PVA to the specimen and swept the entire area. The site was especially pristine thanks to Urs, our Swiss photographer friend, who wanted the perfect photo.
Digging didn't begin in earnest until 11 o'clock. Very soon after that, Kirby found his first, and the only, turtle of the day. It was stuck beneath the ilium, a pelvic bone. Several mini-crews worked on various sections of the fossil, preparing them for removal. John and Tyler Lyson (a young local collector, see "People" below) focused on two of yesterday's turtles; Tyler's had plenty of skeletal material with it. Bob and Kirby worked on the metatarsal block. Sam and Pete began trying to find a dividing path across the skeleton, in order to split the main mass of bones into manageable sections. Their mission was to figure out how to remove the front portion, which contains three skull bones and some cervical ribs. Everywhere they dug, they were thwarted by new bones! Clearly, there are at least parts of cervical vertebrae, cervical ribs, body ribs, and (dare we hope), skull bones, tucked in front of the skeleton.
Bruce and Sam Ellison, volunteers who arrived yesterday, were brushing the concretion west of the area where we found cervical ribswhen Bruce came upon some fragments of a bone. Chris had spotted one of the pieces earlier on, but because it is fragmented and visible only in cross-section, we could not identify it right away. After Bruce dislodged another piece of concretion, revealing more bone cross-section, it was easier to see that the bone was not part of a turtle, T. rex limb, pelvic, or shoulder bones. It was not a vertebra or rib. It did, however, have the morphology and vascularization typical of a skull bone. This was enough to cause Pete to elbow everybody out of the way and see what was happening.
Working within a foot of this bone, he quickly found another. This, too, is no turtle (Pete has recently completed Turtle 101). The exact identification of these bones may remain uncertain until they are prepared in the laboratorythe surrounding rock is too hard to chip away safely in the field. But still, yippee! In addition, the discovery of these bones raises the possibility of finding more of the skull.
Right at 5 p.m., we were hit by a sudden rain shower, and had to tarp quickly. The forecast for the next several days is not good, but we are ever hopeful.
People: Tyler Lyson, a paleontology student from North Dakota, studying in Philadelphia, is home for a break. This was absolutely perfect timing, because Tyler has collected more complete turtles from the Hell Creek Formation than anybody in the world. Since this is Turtle Central, we started a new game, "Name That Turtle." Tyler won instantly. Our species is Plesiobaena antigua. Tyler is a local legend, not only because of his turtle expertise, but also because he's found a number of dinosaur skeletonssome of which have skin. He started collecting in the sixth grade, and he found most of his productive sites before he was in high school. Tyler can't hang around with us much on this trip, but we hope he'll return for at least another day. Meanwhile, our other borrowed talentand skull bone findersthe Ellisons, had to leave us. Thanks, guys.