Hadrosaur! – Dispatches from Montana 2.

We’ve reached the bone bed! It took over two and a half weeks of digging (one and a half on my part) but we’re finally there. Before reaching the bone bed however I managed to find a few other odds and ends within the overburden, including the following:

Another Hadrosaur tooth,
One small Crocodile tooth,
1 Tyrannosaurid Tooth (possibly Daspletosaurus),
Small fragments of ossified tendons,

After digging away the overburden and flattening out the top of the bone bed, we began to prospect within the quarry for dinosaur remains and very rapidly the first bone was discovered, though accidentally and unfortunately with a jack-hammer… with predictable results. This bone was a humerus of a fairly large individual hadrosaur. Within ten minutes of this find the second bone was discovered – this time by more mild means – and turned out to be a toe-bone, though don’t let that fool you into thinking it small, this one individual phalanx measured in the region of fifteen centimetres in length and a good ten in diameter!

I myself managed to uncover my first bone this afternoon after a slow but steady removal of the bone layer. The technique used by the MOR team is that once the overburden is removed, each digger chooses a section of the quarry wall measuring approximately two feet. The digger then proceeds to remove rock steadily decreasing the height of a flat plane with hand awls, chisel, hammer and brushes. Yes; that’s right, every palaeontologist that points to Jurassic Park and say’s “you can’t use a brush to uncover a fossil” is wrong, dead wrong* – at least in this case!

The only time digging is stopped is when high noon is reached and luncheon begins – consisting mainly of whatever you remember to scrounge from the kitchen supplies in the morning! After the first half an hour or so of lunch most people are fast asleep, taking the opportunity to make up for the early start. I on the other hand take the opportunity to rifle through the ever building spoil heap for small fossil remains that were inevitably missed during the overburden removal. The last two days have been moderately productive in this vein, with several pieces of turtle – including shell, a tyrannosaurid pre-maxillary tooth and a ceratopsian tooth.

The whole experience here at the MOR dig is a very different one to the excavations I’ve been privy to on the landslips and beaches of Dorset and Devon, for one thing everything is more considered and slow owing to the fact that there is no tide to keep a look out for and also that no-one would dare walk onto a museum-run site and remove material that had not been collected. As a result the excavations are both more comprehensive and far more scientific. This is not to cast detriment on my experiences at home as each site must be treated differently, but this approach is far more in keeping with the principles of scientific discovery. Every bone is mapped, numbered, catalogued and carefully consolidated long before there is any thought of removing the bone from its tomb.

Anywho, tomorrow is our town day, the one day off we get each week, so I’m now going to disappear and take some time out. Here’s hoping you’ve enjoyed this post, and as with my last I’ll add pictures upon my return to the UK.

Ben D. Brooks
17.6.2012.

*This group used to include me.