Our dinosaur bone hunting experience consisted of two parts. One part involved exploring around the badlands seeking bones exposed by recent heavy rains. The second part involved clawing our way up a loose slope to dig under a ledge of sandstone where Eric, Stacie, and other volunteers involved with operating and promoting Earth Science Foundation in Roundup, Montana, have been carefully unearthing bones. They have, at that very site, collected several bones, including two identified as have come from the first cousin of T. rex.
Today, we will talk about our
time on the ledge.
Once we ascended to the ledge,
Eric and Stacie provided us with trowels, flat-blade screwdrivers, brushes, and
what looked like tools for picking at your teeth. Using the implements, we carefully poked and
pried apart what I can best describe as fractured layers of soft stone. As I worked my way down through the layers, I
wondered how many thousand years an inch or two of depth might represent.
The site we
were digging appears to have been—seventy-some million years ago—a muddy bog or
river bend where the bones of various dinosaurs collected and were locked in
mud.
A few minutes in to my work, I
popped a thin layer of rock free and a section of bone appeared before me. At about the same time, nearby, Stacie
exposed the end of a bone. Once we found
our bones, the work slowed considerably.
We carefully picked around the bones to break up the rock entombing
them. We applied a special water-based
glue to visible cracks in the bones to stabilize the bones as we worked around
them.
To make a long story short, we
eventually freed the bones and gave them over to Eric. The bones will be further stabilized by volunteers
at Earth Science Foundation. Eventually,
the best finds will be donated to the Musselshell Valley Historical Museum in
Roundup.
The experience of burrowing into a soft stone wall to find a bone and then slowly scratching around the bone to free it is mind-altering in a way I cannot fully describe. I wondered what manner of dinosaur produced the bone. I tried to picture the landscape then. The landscape around me was strange. But the history is stranger yet.
Me and the Bone I Unearthed
My Dino Bone Up Close
Applying Glue to Stacie’s Bone
Desiree Watching Eric and
Stacie Work
No comments:
Post a Comment