A Week of Fossils
Two years ago I took a week-long college class, fun right? Normally I would say no, but this was about dinosaurs. I drove down Route 44 to a small, and mostly unknown, town named (). This was in the middle of New Mexico, right in the middle of the desert. Luckily for me, it had rained in the previous week, so instead of everything being brown there was a large amount of green as well. I met up with the other people taking the class, and the professor and the grad students. That day we didn't do much, just spoke about what we'd be doing over the week and were and when to meet the next day. The second day was the first real day of class, and the group piled into a pair of trucks, before going off down a road for the next hour. That was at six AM, we got to the dig site at seven AM. The dig site was halfway up a hill, in a position that made it impossible to get any kind of vehicle anywhere near it. the site itself was a large ledge, with a rocky slope below it and a sheer wall of stone circling it. Above the stone wall was the rock and sand filled dirt, with small, gnarled trees and spiky cacti lining the small path to the only entrance. The entrance, the sloping end of the rock wall, could be slightly tricky to get to while carrying the tools. Once there, we saw that we were limited to different sizes of hammers, chisels, and brushes for tools, nothing powered and nothing extremely heavy. There were three areas to dig at, one was on the floor, where several good fossils were, but where you were restricted to the smallest of tools. The second was low down on the wall, where the stone changed from a greenish-white to reddish-brown, once more only the smaller tools were really used, although sometimes the larger hammers and chisels were needed to break off a chunk that was higher up. The third was near the top of the wall, using large rock hammers and foot-long chisels to break off large chunks of rock to get to the fossil rich rock below. The second and third days were, for me, spent down on my knees, carefully chiseling the rock on the floor. That rock broke easily, but rarely broke the way you wanted it to, making extracting fossils difficult. There I found the first fossil, a Phytosaur tooth. I also later found another fossil, a bit of a limb bone, although we were unable to identify what it was from or which bone it was. The last few days I spent sitting up on the wall, smashing my hammer onto a chisel, in a seemingly futile attempt to remove a chunk from the wall. The rock was hard, but contained nice breaks already. Although it took several minutes of hammering to break, it would break in predictable ways, creating large solid boulders. Here I found two more Phytosaur teeth, these ones larger, and not as well preserved as the first one. After five hours sitting under the hot desert sun breaking apart rocks, we piled into the trucks, and drove for an hour to return to the museum. We would take the next half-hour or so for lunch, and then after cleaning up, we were in the lab. In the lab we would learn about one species and their fossils each day, before we would start cleaning the bones. It was slow, tedious work, and I loved it. We used three tools, water, cotton swabs, and dental picks. Using wet cotton swabs to dampen the rock and loosen the glue holding the fossil together, I then would gently, but quickly scrape at the rock. Although at first it seems to have no effect, after half an hour you start to see some progress. The class ended at five PM, and then we would do the same thing the next day. Although I only found four fossils, I got to keep all of them and had great fun with the class.
