Splitting the Bones

     On the first day I was in the lab for an hour and a half. I worked on cleaning out more on the dirt, and then at the end of the time I revinaced the new bones I found. I also talked to Mitch, another one of the volunteers, about the soil that fills in the old burrows in the jacket I’m working on.  He asked what it was so I told him that, and then we discussed why it might me blue. We concluded that it’s most likely due to copper; because there are copper coated rocks on the Craddock Ranch around the fossils we work on. He was saying that at some point there must have been a vent that let out the copper. And that it makes him wonder if the vent possibly let out toxic gases that killed the creatures that created the burrows. I thought this was a very interesting idea that I’d never thought about before.
     On the second day I was in the lab for two hours and fifteen minutes. My question for the day was does the clump of bone and dirt on the right side of the jacket, in the pictures below, create two lines of bone or is it really just a clump? As I suspected after working on the clump all the time I was in the lab the bones create two lines, but I’m not done working on them yet. It’s amazing to me how much time this detailed work takes, and it explains why paleontology prep work takes so long to complete.
     I also included a picture of a relatively new wall of photography that was put in the Volunteer Library. I like it a lot and I think you should take a look at it.