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! 

Uncovering the...Pelvis?

On Tuesday of last week Dr. Ott - my science teacher, the boys that I'm going on the A-term dig with me, and some other student from our school went to see the movie Dinosaur 13 at the museum. The movie was about Sue, the most complete tyrannosaurus rex ever found. Dr. Bob Bakker, a renowned paleontologist and Curator of Paleontology at HMNS, and Peter Larson, whose team discovered Sue, were both there to talk after the movie. Before the movie I got to go down to lab for about 15 minutes to show Alex, one of the students going on the dig during A-term, what I work on at the museum. I enjoyed being able to share what I do at my internship with another student, and getting to talk about what I've been working on.

On day 1 I went to the lab for 1 1/2 hours. I slowly began to remove the dirt around the pelvis. This is basically what I worked on the whole time. I had to use a lot of water to soften the dirt so I could easily remove it. I'm very excited to be reaching the bottom of the large Jane jacket I've been working on.

On day 2 I went to my internship for 2 1/4 hours. I almost removed all of the remaining dirt that was surrounding the pelvis during that time. I also had to vinac a couple bones back into place. The same ones keep coming loose so I used a thicker vinac to keep them glued. I had never used thicker vinac before, only thiner. It was harder to get out of the bottle, but it definitely worked better than regular vinac. I will be sure to use it in the future when I have bones that won't stop moving. I'm very excited to finish removing the remaining dirt around the pelvis next week. 

Scapula, or Pelvis, or Skull. Oh, my!

On day 1 I went to my internship for 2 hours. I mainly focused on fine detail work under the microscope. In doing this I removed more dirt from the bone clump. I can see two different lines of neuro spine now, but there are a couple places where they look connected that I'm still working on cleaning. At this point I'm not sure if they're actually connected by caliche or if it's just very hard dirt. About halfway through picking at the bones one of them started to come loose so I vinaced it back into place and went to work on removing more dirt from the other side of the jacket. A little while ago I found a flat surface by the other bones that I thought might be a large rock, but this time when I continued to pick at it I realized it was a bone. I continued to clean it off with the dentil pick and found several large pores in it. At this point I had to stop for the day, but I decided to start with this weird bone the next time I came in. There are flat Dimetrodon bones, which I've seen before in the field, but I've never worked on them. One in particular that I've seen is the scapula. It's possible that could be what this is, but the rest of the things in this jacket seem to mainly be neuro spine and fin bones.

On day 2 I went in for 2 1/4 hours. I started moving the dirt that was covering the flat bone right away. Once I had moved a little more dirt I asked another one of the volunteers and David what they thought the bone was; they said it was most likely either part of a scapula or part of a pelvis, but it could also possibly be part of a skull. I continued to move dirt, because at this point there wasn't enough of the bone uncovered to get a good idea of what it might be. After moving the dirt off of it for almost the whole time I was there I asked David what he thought the bone was. He seconded my hypothesis that it's a pelvis, or at least part of one. I thought this because when I looked at the uncovered bone that was the first thing it looked like to me, but there's still more dirt to be removed before it's totally revealed. Take a look at the pictures bellow and see what you think.

Sharpening my Tools

Last week I only went for day 1 because I was out of town the other day. One of the other volunteers that I've gotten to know was working on Blind Smiley. Smiley has been taken out of the large jacket I went on a treasure hunt for on the 4th floor with David and another volunteer to find and transferred into a smaller jacket. There's actually two Diplocauluses, or Boomerang Heads, is the smaller jacket. They have such tiny bones compared to Dimetrodons. The only one I've work on was in Seymour last school year, but I'd love to work on a jacket with one of them after I finish my two Jane jackets; so I can practice my detail work.

I continued to work on the cleaning the clump of bones/dirt I was working on last time. I used the microscope to get a better view and found out how to adjust the height of the arm it's on, which was a great help. I also learned where the sharpening stone is for the pick tool I've been using is located. This made my life much easier because the pick was starting to get dull and I didn't know how to sharpen it. I'll definitely be using that stone again in the future!

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.