Oklahoma Museum of Nat. Hist. Trip

[Tompaleo@aol.com]

Hello Gang,

Well, I'm back from my trip out west and thought I write a quickie summary of 
my work at OMNH for those who may be interested.

I was there for only a week, actually 6 days not counting flying. The first 3 
days were spent dry screening and in some cases rewashing, and concentrating 
some 7 boxes of was that I had shipped to OMNH the week before. This is a 
particularly laborious, messy time consuming and dangerous process as Zinc 
Bromide was used as the heavy liquid (Specific Gravity @ 2.4). ZnBr is also a 
toxic substance that must be worked under a fume hood. This process, once you 
get used to the procedure works quite well especially in the new labs at the 
University of Oklahoma (Norman) bran new museum! More on that later.
Between and after this aspect of the job was don, I had free run of the 
facility (with a special security pass card) to look up and copy references 
and to view the museum's sizable fossil collections. Of course, any museum of 
this caliber has material from all geologic ages and from many sites. My 
particular research interests are in Early Cretaceous biogeography and 
paleoecology. Naturally I gravitated to fossil cabinets housing material from 
the Cloverly, Cedar Mt. and Antlers Fm's. Incidentally, they have also 
started an "Arundel" cabinet which houses a cast of our Arundelconodon 
hottoni. I'm sure more material will be found to keep this guy company!
God! I wish I had more time to do some comparative work there but I had to 
stick with the mission as planned. I managed to get about 75% of the matrix 
heavy-liquided. once enough concentrate was had, I also started picking 
through the material and in the very first spoon full (a small one at that) I 
found a micro-sized croc tooth. It's less than 1 mm long! A couple of 
spoonfuls later I also picked out a micro sized hybodont tooth! Now I've seen 
and collected some very small teeth from the above taxa before on outcrop but 
these specimens would have been easily missed even by me had they been in in 
situ!

The Museum is awesome! I'm ready to move to Oklahoma! The museum is also not 
on line as yet and they are rushing to meet a Spring 2000 grand opening so 
things were naturally all crazy. Take for instance in collections where the 
labels for the specimens do NOT correlate with the specimen that resides in 
that slot. I saw a glyptodont "shell" (carapace) sitting in the Jurassic 
sauropod section. Not to worry though, they are aware of this and are still 
unpacking the fossils and these are of course temporary spots for them. 
The security system is also pretty tight. Card keys are issued to staff and 
visitors alike which grant various levels of access. These cards are turned 
in at the end of the day and reissued on arrival the next morning. Anytime 
one leaves or enters the building, even for a smoke break, you have to go 
through this procedure.

My hosts at the museum were Rich Cifelli and his grad students Cindy Gordon 
and Randy Nydam who's hospitality both on and off-campus were extraordinary. 
Moreover, this latest trip was the culmination of a summer's long 
collaboration with Rich and OMNH that started in June with Cindy coming out 
here to work with me in the Arundel and to organize my screen washing project 
in June. In July I worked with them in Montana (the Cloverly) and August was 
the above trip. One Hell of a summer if I do say so myself! And, since I did 
not finish all of what needed to be done, I get to return, probably in 
January to play with more toxic chemicals to finish the last of the matrix. 


Reality sometimes sucks!

It's been nearly a month since I returned from OMNH and I have only had time 
to pick a couple spoonfuls of concentrate. Alas, now that classes have begun 
and my goofey-weather affected job have conspired to give me a reality check. 
 Judging from my initial results however, there ought to be more of the "good 
stuff" yet to pick!  I'll keep you posted.

Hope this was of interest!

Cheers,

Thomas R. Lipka
Paleontological/Geological Studies