Vinegar & Water

     On day 1 I went to the museum for 1 1/2 hours. On this day I worked with water and the dental pick to continue cleaning the bone I was working on last time. There's so much dirt on these bones, so they take quite a bit of cleaning. The other difficulty with these bones is that they've been sitting for a year with the dirt drying out on them. This means that I have to use a lot of water to loosen the dirt up so I can get it off. I think I need to scrub these bones down with water and a toothbrush to loosen up the dirt enough to really remove it all. I'm excited to get them cleaned so I can play around with them to see how they fit together.

     On day 2 I went the lab for 2 1/4 hours. This time I decided to work with another one of the bones I've been working on to practice cleaning with vinegar. I started out with cotton swabs and vinegar, which worked well but was using a lot of cotton swabs for not a lot of progress so I changed my tactic. I decided instead to scrub the bone down with vinegar and a toothbrush to loosen up more of the dirt. This plan worked really well and I was able to get the majority of the dirt loosened up. I followed this up with water and a toothbrush so that the vinegar wouldn't be left of the bone to eat away at it, this is a very important step. After this process I was able to get the majority of the dirt off. So I followed this up with the small air scribe to take off small amounts of caliche at a time. You can see the progress below. 

Losing the Red

     Last week I had a meeting about the Paleontology A-Term for 1 1/4 hours and did prep-work for an hour.

     During the meeting Dr. Ott and I finalized the budget and chaperones for the trip, got the readings together, and wrote up a syllabus and description.

     In the lab I worked more on removing the very red dirt from the Jane bone I've been working on for a couple weeks now. I'm finding that the vinegar does a much better job of loosening the dirt from the bone than the water does. The one thing I have to be careful with when using vinegar is that I remove it in a timely fashion, because if it sits on the bones for too long it can start to erode them. You can see how much red dirt I've been able to remove from the bones using the vinegar and a dental pick.

The Petrified Wood Vault

     Last week I go to go to the museum for an hour because we had a shortened week of school. While there I got to go with David to pick out a slab of petrified wood for a display and learned where all the petrified wood is kept. As you can see below that there's a lot of it, and some of it is very heavy! I wonder how much prep work has to be done on petrified wood when it's found? I don't know if it gets some sort of caliche on it or if it's typically cleaner than fossils are. I will ask David about this next time I seem him and let you all know. After looking at the petrified wood I was able to do a little bit more cleaning on the Jane bone from last week for about fifteen minutes before I left.

Vinegar, Some Big Bones, and a Database

     This week I went to the museum once for 2 1/4 hours. David was out of town,  and I needed to talk to him about trimming the plaster of my large jacket, so I decided I would work on my small jacket instead. I had forgotten that the small jacket was completely done except for one small part because of how many bones were on top of the dirt there. Originally I thought there were only a couple bones so I could just label and remove them, but when I saw how many small pieces of bone there were I decided against that. So when David gets back I'll need his help cutting plaster and photographing the small jacket so I can remove those bones and then finish removing dirt.
     We brought back a couple sets of bones wrapped in aluminum foil when we came back from Seymour last year, and I realized last week that they never got cleaned. So I decided to work on those after the jackets were a bust. The reason we didn't make a jacket around these bones was because they'd already moved around so much in the field that we didn't really need to preserve their location. Instead we drew and photographed them, labeled them with Sharpie because the caliche will be removed later, and collected them. I got to work on two of the bones while I was in the lab this last week, and neither are done being cleaned. I started by spraying the first bone down with water and using a dentil pick to remove large amount of dirt. I followed that by scrubbing down the bone with vinegar and a toothbrush. While I let that sit for 10-15 minutes I started doing the same thing on a second bone. After 10-15 minutes I picked more dirt off of the first bone with a dental pick and then scrubbed it down with water and a toothbrush to get the vinegar off. I ended up having to dry the bone by hand because that's when I had to leave, but I'll work more on this set of bones next week.
     Check out pictures of the cleaning process below!
     I also got to talk to one of the other volunteers about the database he's spearheading to enter all of our fossils into; that's a picture of it at the very bottom.

Back to Work...As a Tour Guide?

     This week I went to the museum for 1 3/4 hours, and I got to act as a tour guide for a group of students from Bay Area Montessori House, the elementary school I attended.This was a bunch of fun because the group was very into dinosaurs and Dimetrodons. To start I walked them through the Permian section of the Paleontology Hall. There I got to share my knowledge of how to tell an amphibian skull, the dimples; how they originally dug for Dimetrodons in the Texas Red Beds, with dynamite; how they found the Judy Block, with a backhoe; and who Willy is, the HMNS Dimetrodon. Then we walked through the Dinosaur section of the hall, which they thoroughly enjoyed. After that I got to do something really cool; which was to take them down to the lab, with David's permission, for a behind-the-scenes-tour. There I got to show them a very special Diplocaulus, Boomerang Head, specimen as well as the Jane jackets that I've worked on. They also got to see another volunteer working on a specimen with one of the air scribes, and look as some coprolites, fossilized poop.

     I really enjoyed getting to teach some kids about what I do, especially ones that go to the school that I went to. I know technically I'm not that old in the field of Paleontology, but it's still really cool to be able to teach people who are younger than you about what you do. 

Sorting Through Soil Samples

I was gone for a while on Winter Break and only went to the lab for one day this week, but that's ok because I got to go for 2 1/4 hours. I started out working on picking off the tiny dirt layer from the bones under the microscope, but I quickly realized the jacket it too tall to get the microscope into and close enough to the bones. Next time I go I'll talk to David about cutting off some of the excess jacket so that I can get the microscope in the right place. Instead of trying to continue working with the microscope I decided to work of some of the soil samples from around Ellie. I found many small pieces of bone and shark cartilage. I also found that I had a much easier time tell fossils from dirt, plaster, and rocks. I'm sure that this is because I've been working with fossils for a while, and the last time I worked on soil samples was when I first started at my internship. It's good to go back to things I was doing before and see how much I've improved.

Removing the Dirt

For the week before Winter Break I went to the lab on day 1 for 2 hours, and on day 2 for 2 1/4 hours. For these two days I pretty much only focused on getting the rest of the dirt out of the large Jane jacket. Now I need to work under the microscope with the tiny pick to clean the small layer of dirt that's still on the bones so that I can remove the bones on the right side of the jacket. Once I remove these bones I will keep digging under the bones till I reach the bottom of the jacket. If I find any other bones I will have to clean them as well. I still think the flat bone is part of a pelvis, but when I remove it from the jacket I will know exactly what it is. Towards the end of the second day I realized that the bones I originally thought were two toes are actually part of a vertebrae, as you can see below. I'm very excited to be reaching the bottom of the jacket!