For the past week I was in Wyoming near the Big Horn Mountains, digging up dinosaurs with my paleontology class as the final event in my U of C career. The group of us all met up outside the fossil lab at 3:45 in the morning and took cabs to the airport. A series of little jumps later, and we were in Billings, Montana picking up some rental vans and driving off into the great unknown (literally, as we didn't know our exact dig site until we got our field guides that morning; fossil hounds are apparently a concern and will come and steal bones if your site gets around too much).
First of all, whatever else I or anyone might have said about Montana/Wyoming, they're beautiful states. I mean, really. All the hills have eroded just enough that rock strata peek out from beneath sage bushes and scrub trees, making the landscape weirdly patterned and colorful. A lot of rock walls along the roads there are labelled with the formation (Chugwater, Sundance, etc) and the approximate age of that formation, which was awesome. On our way in we actually got to stop and touch some granite rocks that were formed 3.2 billion years ago; almost certainly the oldest thing I will ever poke.
We also passed the formation above, called The Fallen City. I think you can see why; it's really incredible to behold. Like a lot of the things we saw, I would have loved to be able to hike over and really get up close, but it was miles and miles away, with no roads or trails to it, and we had dinosaurs to go dig up. We did get to stop a lot along the way for mini lectures on the geology of various areas, and I learned that my camera apparently has GPS-related powers and knew where we were.
Eventually we made it to our stated goal of Shell, Wyoming, which is a tiny, tiny town sort of in the northernmost middle of the state. Our home base was a restaurant-convenience/souvenir store called Dirty Annie's, after the sheep-herding woman who built the place. She is memorialized by a truly creepy mannequin in a covered wagon out front.
The day after that, we headed out into the wilderness proper to set up our camp. When it rains, the camp becomes completely inaccessible due to infinity mud. As it was, we just had to get out occasionally so as not to sink the car. There were two drivers, the inimitable Paul Sereno of legend, and our car's driver Erin. Erin is an artist/paleontologist who builds models of dinosaurs for Sereno and for the Field Museum and who played Scandinavian death metal for most of the rides. She also does longsword fighting. In short, badasses. We weren't lacking them.
Our first task, upon reaching our campsite, was to remove the enormous amounts of cow shit that had been deposited there by our neighbors, a herd of cows. Now cows, they don't moo anything like cows are theoretically supposed to. There is no neat 'mooing' sound. There's sort of an eldritch, tortured groan that I guess you could convince yourself sounded like 'moo' if you really wanted to. But anyway. After that, we finally got to open up the site.
Paleontologists, when interrupted at a site before they can get everything out, so most of the time, basically just put down a protective tarp over what they've been working on and rebury everything to prevent bonehunters and weather from destroying all their hard work. So the first task is just to find everything again, dig it back up (albeit much less carefully and strenuously than the first time), and unroll the tarps. The site we're working at has a pretty excellent history involving renegade Swedish scientists facing off with angry ranchers to collect huge numbers of fossils. Our area contains the remains of a member of Stegosauria, either Stegosaurus proper or one of its less well known colleagues Hesperosaurus, and what we thought was a Camarasaurus but now think may be an entirely new Sauropod taxon.
Most of my trip was devoted to the Stegosaur, specifically its humerus. I got to work on its vertebrae and ribs some too, but over the course of the week I trenched, pedestaled, cleaned, jacketed, and took out of the ground that damn forearm (with copious help from Erin). In some ways, I think I had the ideal dino-digging experience as I got to participate in the entire process of excavating and removing part of a dinosaur from beginning to end. I actually found a tooth while I was working as well, a sauropod tooth, so I even got the discovery part. While the tooth got ferried back to the lab to be fixed up, no one really cared about the dirt around it, so I put some B-72 consolidator on it and now have my very own cast of a tooth I found.
Now, I want to preface this by saying I expected the trip to be fantastic. It was a dinosaur dig, after all. But it exceeded my expectations by orders of magnitude anyway. Partly, this was because the parts I expected to be unpleasant actually weren't. Understand, I am allergic to everything. I was not constructed to go outside. I'm allergic to fruit, nuts, touching most plants, dust, pollen, mold, and even sunlight (okay, that latter isn't an allergy, but my pupils dilate weirdly such that exposure to sunlight is particularly painful). I have mild asthma, exacerbated by being vaguely out of shape and by high altitude, and I burn in sunlight like poorly attended barbecue. Add to that the fact that dino excavation is, in fact, tedious and backbreaking. You need to twist yourself into truly fantastical positions in order to access your work area without sitting on a millions-of-years-old bone in the process and then stay there for hours painstakingly chipping at rocks with a pointy sledgehammer.
None of these things failed to be true on my trip; digging is hard, bone is not actually that easy to identify on sight, you basically do the same thing all day, it's either burning or freezing, and I had to take twice the recommended dose of Claritin in order to breathe even remotely normally. And none of that really mattered at all. It certainly helped that everyone on the trip was awesome to be around--I mean really. No one complained about having to clean dishes or scratch at rocks for hours, and everyone volunteered instantly for any chore that needed doing. But more importantly, everyone just stayed enormously excited about what we were doing. A lot of the trip doesn't make for good stories--'I was digging for like three hours around this bone only to find out it was actually plant matter and a concretion, but then I realized that the concretion was made of iron and had this really cool shape and I got to keep it and it was great'--but it was totally riveting at the time. Everyone rediscovered their inner five year old, even more than you already inherently do on a dinosaur dig, and collected every cool looking rock they saw and ran around showing it to everyone trying to identify it. We also found a lot of non-fossil bones, which we had to be dissuaded from collecting (one guy did actually bring home most of a skeleton).
If anything about digging was boring, by the second day I didn't notice it. And I have some sweet rocks. We got treated to the joys of Wyoming radio while we worked (99.1-The Gun), and I promise you I actually heard with my own ears an ad for cat food that purported to be "now that Osama bin Laden is dead, this is a taped message from his cat--Osama bin Kitten" declaring jihad on American homes and that Fancy Feast cat food awaited him in paradise. I heard it several times, so it couldn't have been heat stroke. I leave you with that thought.
We went on a couple of hikes (I was lazy and didn't go on all of them) that were just beyond gorgeous. Noah and I wanted to walk to this epic valley, which we were all referring to as the Valley of the Dead, but after about an hour we realized that the Valley was maybe a day's hike away. The air is so clear there that you can't really judge distances, and we would often set out for something only to realize that while it looked like it was right there it was really miles away.
I should probably take a moment to note that Paul Sereno is an A-level badass. This blog would look like the transcript for a series of Indiana Jones meets Die Hard movies if I wrote down all of the stories he told us about his hi-jinks, but suffice it to say that he drove across the Sahara in the middle of a civil war to rescue 16 tons of dinosaur bones, the minister of tourism set bandits on one of his expeditions, and he must have told us about no fewer than twelve different ways in which he had almost died, starting with gym teacher and going up through desert bandits. The first few were prefaced with an explanation of how he was a practical man and, statistically speaking, people were mostly likely to die doing ordinary, daily things like driving their cars. All subsequent near-death experiences were heralded by him saying, "And I thought, I'm not going to die like this. It's too improbable." And then him not dying, usually through crazy. Basically, we have decided to replace Chuck Norris with Paul Sereno. It would be more appropriate and more awesome.
We were a pretty productive dig, and we got a lot jacketed and lot out of the ground. We also, when we got back to electricity, watched Jurassic Park with more rage (at the 'dig' in the opening scenes) than anyone who hasn't spent a week fighting to get a crumbling rib out of sandstone can imagine. Then we took White Rhino and Silver Fox (our buses) on the long journey back towards civilization, stopping only to look at a dinosaur tracksite and have a British man command us to do Sherlock Holmes to it. Noah and did a pretty badass job of figuring out the ecology
We spent umpteen hours at what I will now deem the failport attempting to leave. Our first flight was cancelled, and our second one was delayed repeatedly such that we spent nearly seven hours waiting. Let me tell you, the Billings airport is boring. There's only one mediocre cafeteria and one store, and the store didn't even sell bags of goddamn chips. And we had skipped lunch to make the first flight. So I read about the movie Cowboys and Aliens (I want to go see it! Who's with me? Anyone?) in Cowboys and Indians Magazine, the premier magazine of the west and played Words With Friends. And used my dinosaur coloring book. And met this water fountain, which really encapsulated the whole experience.
Then we had a really bumpy set of rides back, in which we were all super sleep-addled, and arrived at 4:00 am. So that's my story. I have infinity pictures; you can probably find most of them on facebook if you give me a few days :p
No comments:
Post a Comment