Discovering Dinosaurs and Solving a Mystery

My campground is a line 20 long of RVs paired with pickup trucks.  It’s all men working construction jobs nearby or out on the oil fields.  The trucks leave just before light in one big convoy.  Somewhere there’s likely a family back home I think.  I make my way to the shower area with peeling blue paint and spider eggs on the wall.  I take a quick camp suds shower under harsh fluorescent tube lights while a country song plays over a loudspeaker about getting drunk on a plane.  It’s 6:30 in the morning. I grab my kneepads, work gloves, a gallon of water, my brimmed hat and I head out. 

My wife was surprised when I set up this adventure.  A week working a paleontology dig in the hills of Wyoming.  “You’re going to sit in the hot sun for a week digging in the dirt with a toothbrush?” she joked.  The truth is that I’ve always wanted to do some sort of archaeology/paleontology dig.  It’s on my list of adventures.  I’m not really a dinosaur buff but I am a generally curious person who loves learning and history…and I am ready to work for it.  

The dream of working with dinosaurs…

The reality of working with dinosaurs…

A Special Dig Site

When bones first started to come out of the ground at this dig site, they appeared to be ceratopsian (the same family as the triceratops). However, some of the bones do not match anything ever found in the past.  There is reason to believe that this could be a Torosaurus:

If this skeleton is that of a Torosaurus, it is the most complete record of this dinosaur ever found. There are also more bones being located every day at the site.  It is pretty cool to be a part of something that could prove to be a notable scientific discovery. It could also provide a reference to others looking to identify past and future fossil sets.  Finding the skull would be a definitive moment. I was hopeful at any minute that my pick would hit that firm stop and I would brush off a couple of eye sockets or uncover the end of a frill. 

Sean Smith is in charge of the dig and also museum curator at the Paleon Museum in Glenrock, Wyoming.  He is patient, and great to work with like a natural teacher.  When it comes to the Lance Formation he may be the best paleontologist in the world.

At one point, Sean is pointing out that while a giant asteroid did hit in Mexico around 66 million years ago, some delicate species like frogs and turtles survived.  Hence, the cause of dinosaur extinction may have been more complicated than this one factor alone.  I ask him to speculate on what his best extinction theory is. Sean tells me some things that he knows but as a true scientist he will not speculate and risk perpetuating some half baked theory.

The hillside on which we work is like a timeline tilted up by the geologic heave of the mountains in the distance. The further down you go the older it gets. Pronghorn and mule deer clear in front of us as we curve our way up to site. If it wasn’t for some tarps as sun shelter we would probably last only a couple of hours in the heat. “Overburden” is a quaint word for the 6-8 feet of pickaxing and shoveling that we have to do to get down close to the bone layer. It seems to over simplify the truth of the labor that it takes.

It’s millions of years of history as feet of dirt are removed.  The needle in the haystack is dinosaurs that fell somewhere in conditions that were just right for fossilization. It’s dry up here now but 68 million years ago water was flowing in this area.  If a Torosaurus, Triceratops, or a T-Rex met its end in water with some iron present, fossils may still be down there today. 

As Sean points out, the absence of fossils may not mean the absence of dinosaurs. It may simply mean that conditions changed or environment did not favor fossilization.  Hold on I think, you mean maybe there may have been a super godzilla T-Rex that was 700 feet tall but just hated the water and stayed away?  I should probably keep that idea to myself haha.

Dinosaurs: Truth vs Fiction

Someone mentions that doing paleontology is like putting together an impossibly hard jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing and no picture on the box.  In fact no one has ever even seen the picture.  Once assembled, you get a single snapshot photo and then try to put these together into a historical record like having one still frame from a whole movie.  There’s so many gaps but wow what we do know so far is super cool!  100 ton lizards and skulls the size of a car.  While humans have been here for around 2M years, dinosaurs lived on earth for over 165M.  This inspires artists to guess at exactly what dinosaurs looked like and the public consciousness uses its imagination to fill in the rest.  Then somehow we find ourselves here: 

Where is the fossil record of dinosaurs attacking racetracks anyway?  Dinosaurs may be one of those rare cases where the truth is even more interesting than what we could make up.

The Reality of a Paleontology Dig

I started to get the hang of how to use the dig tools by learning through doing.  When I first hit fossilized wood and plant matter I thought, hey cool I’m finding fossils:

There was also a 2nd “micro-fossil” site that we worked at a bend in a pre-historic river. This provided more information on the environment during the time period of these dinosaurs.  It was just up the hill from the possible torosaurus site.  I found a triceratops tooth, gar scales, and loads of little bone and teeth fragments at this other site.  I bottled each to be sorted later in the lab. 

Already on the first day I made discoveries and met some interesting folks. Pretty cool. I built some blisters and tore a hole in my hand while shoveling. So I am pretty sure that I earned this mango flavored malt beverage purchased off sale from the local bar which was also the liquor store:

Finding the Edge of a 68 Million Year Old Mystery

After spending another day digging down a couple of feet through an alternating mix of sandstone and hard block of chocolate like rock we came up empty handed.  We must have hit the edge of the pond was the guess.  I made some remark at how I really thought we would find something in that spot.  You did find something, Sean remarked. “You just found the edge of a 68 million year old mystery.” I must have been delirious from the sun because this made me laugh pretty hard.

Being a paleontologist is a lifestyle and Sean has paid the price for his science.  It is long work in the field every summer while the ground is thawed.  Winter freezes the ground along with the tourist traffic to the museum and might mean doing residential remodeling work until spring.  However, it is better than having to do job work on the road. 

I upgraded to a Super 8 in Casper and it was the same line of pickup trucks out front off at first light to construction or energy jobs.  It was big luxury for me to feel that hot shower. The soft bed was pretty great on my back after hunching over a pit for a few days.  

68 Million Year Old Bones

I got the chance to start to work on some of the bones up close. I even got to cast a couple and learn how to use a transit geological compass to map a dig.

After countless bucket loads of dirt removed carefully with a pick, I tapped something solid and slowly revealed this rib:

It is amazing how much detail remains after fossilization. You can see every detail of the bone surface and even the spongy middle if there are breaks. The bones of this dinosaur are stacked and interlocked like a super high stakes game of Jenga combined with Don’t Break the Ice.

We moved from pick axes to ice picks to dental picks carefully brushing off and exposing each bone.  Butvar and superglue helped to reinforce the fossilized bone. Then each was pedestaled, casted and hand carried back to the lab.  Even with the tops of several exposed, it took us an entire day with a team of 4 to remove two bones.

Everything will be assembled into a museum display after it is treated, restored, and studied in the lab.  It takes about a decade and countless hours of teamwork to create each of those skeletons that I walked by casually at a science museum in the past and probably said “oh that’s kinda neat.”  

My Super Brief Career as Paleontologist

I did not find the skull before the shadows started getting longer on my final day.  However, we did start to untangle that super high stakes jenga game and get some key fossils back to the lab.  We also found additional bones adding to this already substantial dig find.  While I may be leaving, I know that Sean is going to finish this job.  Even if it takes until 2020 to do so.  

I have been told that some paleontologists are primarily academic while others spend most of their time in the field.  After seeing what I picked up after just one week, I can’t imagine that putting together the movie of what life was like back then could be divined better from samples or secondary sources when all of the context and subtleties are out on the prairie. 

I really had a great time.  Big thanks to Sean and the Paleon Museum of Glenrock for letting this maniac jump in head first and really do some field work.  Also, thanks to Matthew Mossbrucker at the Morrison Museum for getting me in touch with this dig.  I will be waiting for updates and wishing best of luck as the project continues.