Re: Yearly SD dig, Pachy skulls, & tree nesting

[Chuck Prime <prime@winternet.com>]

On Sun, 29 Jun 1997, Roger A. Stphenson wrote:

> Greetings all,
> 
> In a few days I'm off to dig in the Hell Creek Formation very near where
> Sue was found. We, our team, has done some sweet work over the past two
> summers, but we've only begun to scratch the surface of a vast deposit.
> While our finds are cool we have the classic problems in dealing with bones
> that have not been replaced by minerals, they're extremely fragile
> sometimes. In the sandy deposits the bones are often hollow,

Many dinos _had_ hollow bones, so far as I know.


> or very spongey,

You're digging up cows.  :-)


> and in the mudstones they are often brittle. Anyone have any "Hell
> Creek hints" they're willing to share?

I doubt I have enough experience to be of any help, but I'm willing to 
stick my foot in my mouth trying.

Don't coat the entire universe with Butvar. I've made that mistake. It's
often better to use hypodermics with thin cyanoacrylates and stabilize
certain cracks that way. I presume you have plenty of sifters for sorting
all those frag trails from the sand they so often wash down. Those
frags can be important. I'd suggest sandboxes for transport stability, but
you may be well ahead of me on all of this.

Damn, I want to get out there again... My girlfriend and I are as amateur
as they get, but we find things and have fun. We go near Rhame ND, where a
particular ranching family has let us poke around on their land several
times in the past.

Yes, there are vast deposits in kh, although the member we search in seems
to have more bones than partial skeletons (the Dakota Dino Museum tells me
this is normal Hell Creek stratigraphy). One particular ledge also reveals
_different_ things each year we go to it. Dino bone, turtle scute and bone
and shell, Sequoia Dakotensis cones...

What _I_ would like to know is how one can get paid to spend summers
searching these areas for important finds.  :-)  There is so _much_ area
to cover, and I rarely even _hear_ of anyone else covering the places we
go. We can see miles of Hell Creek we have never had time to look at, and
every season, more bone erodes out, turns into frags, washes down the
hillsides, and is lost forever.

It would be best to thoroughly cover such areas every 2 years, at least.
An entire trike was found (by others) several years ago in one of the
spots we go to. (The less productive of the two, I might add.) Some
pictures from there appeared in some ND Geologic Survey papers from
somewhere around the same time. These are the only cases known to me of
anyone else doing anything in that area. While I like having it
essentially to myself, it does seem a tremendous waste, given my "skills"
and lack of available time.

Nice bird story. MacGyver would be proud.


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