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| My Dinosaur Dig Experience | |
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| Topic Started: Jul 6 2017, 07:02 PM (423 Views) | |
| Acinonyx Jubatus | Jul 6 2017, 07:02 PM Post #1 |
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I AM THE UNSHRINKWRAPPER!
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Southwestern Adventist University is a christian university located in Texas. Every summer for the last 20 years they've hosted a laboratory course in the Lance Formation of eastern Wyoming- a paleontology course, where you can actually spend a month in the field digging up dinosaur bones. I had the opportunity this year to attend the Dinosaur Research Project, and it was far and away one of the best experiences of my life. Photos The course consisted of both a lab and a lecture component. The lab component included not just participation (A typical day consists of 8 hours a day digging) but also how well you documented the fossils you found (they give you a little red field notebook, in which you had to draw a picture of everything you find and record any pertinent details such as measurements, the kind of soil it was in, any other adjacent bones, etc.) and also your attitude. The lecture component consisted of five lectures a week, usually about an hour long, that covered topics such as taphonomy, dinosaur classifications, history of palaeontology, origins, geology, and sometimes gripping stories about the project director's personal experiences in Peru and the Canadian Arctic. (I feel I ought to mention that the project is overtly young-earth creationist- a fact which will automatically make many of you despise it- but I was amazed at the scientific rigor and open-mindedness with which the professional research team carefully observed the data to form conclusions. These are not crackpots like Kent Hovind, but intelligent, respectable scientists. Please respect that, even if you don't respect their worldview.) The project took up the entire month of June. We worked all week in the quarries and on the weekends, we'd either laze around at camp or go into town for tourism reasons. On Fridays we had half-days; we'd work in the mornings and go into town in the afternoon to do our laundry. Then we'd usually get pizza in town. Saturdays we either did our own thing or hiked around the ranch (It was very scenic) and on Sundays we drove to town for a day of sightseeing- We saw Crazy Horse National Monument, Mount Rushmore, the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research (by popular request, twice) and the Mammoth excavation in Hot Springs, South Dakota. I found over 30 bones on the trip- Most of them insignificant fragments, but there were some really cool stuff, too. The biggest thing I found was a femur, probably from a Triceratops but we're not 100% sure (It seems to have a Fourth Trochanter, something which Trikey does not have) that was 103.4 cm long. It was smashed up against the Ilium of a much smaller Edmontosaurus. I also found what might be a skull fragment of a theropod, which given that the only other theropod found in that particular quarry was Anzu, probably belonged to that genus. As well, I found a Troodon tooth, numerous fish scales, a couple of crocodile scutes, a couple of Hadrosaur Teeth (one of which I got to take home) BUCKETLOADS of tendons, and the tooth of a Nanotyrannus (which, I'm ashamed to say, I subsequently lost- it was underneath the clavicle of an Edmontosaurus and I had to take the larger bone out before I could get to the tooth. I took the bone out, looked down, and the tooth was randomly gone. No idea where it went.) Several other cool things were found by other people- An Edmontosaur sacrum, an ulna and several vertebrae from an Anzu, seventeen articulated tail vertebrae from an Edmontosaurus, a Hyoid bone, and a very fragmented Tyrannosaurus tooth. All in all it was an amazing trip. I'm so glad I went and I hope to go again next year. |
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