My 10 days as a Sooner (long)

[Tompaleo@aol.com]

This year's installment of trips to OMNH was a productive one despite a 
nearly fatal monkey wrench inflicted by the good old USPS.  This year, those 
sob's really earned their moniker, "snail mail." With just under two weeks to 
go before I was due to fly in, I sent parcel post, 1 (one) box of matrix from 
this past Summer's field work brought to you in part by the Bryan Patterson 
prize. From past experience with sending 6 such boxes there, all at once, and 
only taking 9 days, I figured one lousy package should reach in a similar 
time or less. NOT! It took them exactly 15 days to get the packaged there by 
which time, I was already attempting to start a trace on it! The box arrived 
on the _last_ day of heavy liquiding and after I had begun to clean up the 
lab and started researching the collections. Luckily, I still had two nearly 
full boxes of material from the original 6 to work on. This kept me busy for 
the full period and it kept me on my time table. 
Except for this one hitch, everything went well. I had the entire museum to 
myself and at my disposal. It was their spring break and nearly everyone 
except one of Cifelli's grad students (who also let me crash in her spare 
bedroom for the entire science part of the trip) was out of town. But Rich 
saw to it that I was taken care of. Immediately after getting in town (Friday 
evening) we drove to the museum where the heavy liquid (ZnBr) apparatus was 
set up in the fume hood and ready to go. It was already evening there, so we 
took care of getting me introduced to the security personnel and an ID badge 
was made which effectively made me OMNH staff for the week. Everything was 
now ready for a modestly early Saturday morning start. As for the ZnBr 
process, it's not all that difficult or remarkable so I won't go into 
describing it here. Suffice it to say that it is really very tedious and 
very, very messy especially with silty-lignitic material such as the Arundel. 
The fact that this process is performed under a fume hood because of it's 
"mild" toxicity helps one to maintain perspective. As for results from 
picking the matrix, I was only able to do a small part of it ther but in that 
small part, I found a couple more shark teeth and a couple fish teeth so it 
looks promising. I'll be picking the stuff here in my own "lab" throughout 
the season. As for the boner by the USPS, all was not in vain. There is a 
good chance the the good folks there can kncok out the heavy liquiding of 
this forlorn box and send it back to me in short order. It just pisses me off 
that it had to go this route in the first place!
Anyhow...
In the same room and only 3 or 4 meters behind me was the vaunted 
"Tenontosaur with a head" we've all heard about. It was my ever-present 
companion in the virtually empty 2nd floor! Most of ithe specimen is still in 
it's jacket. The preparators have so far removed one of the limbs 
(femur/tibia/fibula) part of the tail and one of the hands. The skull was 
partly visible in the jacket but here's the interesting part. The animal was 
found essentially on its back (left dorsal I believe), it's tail curled in 
sort of figure 8-ish up and onto the torso, with one scapula-coracoid almost 
super imposed on the other. The neck is almost hyper extended and the skull 
rests with the dentaries facing the viewer.  From a taphonomic standpoint 
this is very unusual (so I have been told) for Tenontos that they have been 
finding in that almost all the animals seem to be found with more definitive 
signs of rigor-mortis, especially in the manus/pes which usually display the 
unguals flexed 90 degrees from the plane of the hand (think of old Fred 
Sanford's "arthritis"). This guy was not. It may have been swamped and buried 
rapidly while still alive and compressed if not crushed (thereby explaining 
the near -- superimposition of the scaps) during some violent sedimentologic 
event. Another cool aspect about the skull, the dentaries in particular 
appear to also show newly erupting teeth pushing up at the time of death 
which would also seem to attest to a rapid death and burial. About 1/2 to 1/3 
of the tail has been removed (prepped out) but all of it is preserved in 
great detail as evidenced by the network of ossified tendons which run along 
the caudal verts. 

The Museum itself is superbly done. As I indicated earlier, it's about 90% 
finished. The dioramas and skeletal mounts really complement each other and 
are very dynamic. Even the "overburden" (i.e., Cenozoic stuff) is nicely 
done. In fact, as one enters the exhibits, you start in the Cenozoic and move 
back in time. So the first thing you see is a nice set of mounts with a Saber 
Toothed cat sparring with a cave bear over a dead and very large bison 
carcass. Cool!
There is of course the requisite mammoth, one of it's evolutionary ancestors 
(whose name escapes me now) and a large carnivorous bird. Just past the bird, 
the Mesozoic mounts start. Here the visitor is presented with the biggest 
ceratopsian mount I have ever seen! It's the vaunted _Pentaceratops_ with a 
10ft high frill. I could not fit it in my camera lens it was so tall. This is 
truly a huge beast! At this point the pathway bifurcates and gets a little 
Towards the left is the Early K and towards the right, the Paleozoic and the 
unfinished part of the museum which so far only has a large mount of 
_Allosaurus_ waiting for company.
Continuing down the, Mesozoic is a nicely done, dynamic set of mounts with 
two _Deinonychus_ attacking in pack style some _Tenontosaur_ babies with it's 
frantic mother trying to defend them. One of these velociraptorines has a 
baby "tonto" (as we like to call them) in it's mouth while it's buddy (or 
mate) tries to grab a snack as well. Off in the dark corner of this same 
exhibit is a lowly furball, _Gobiconodon_sort of keeping a low profile while 
watching what must have been a regular scene during the Early K of North 
America.

Moving past this, my favorite exhibit, is a small alcove of sorts with 
examples of contemporaneous Mesozoic mammals on one wall, another wall with 
the ancestry of crocs and yet another with the ancestry of theropods. Another 
small area has a fully mounted _Xiphactinus_ shark, turtle, _Hesperornis_, 
ammonites, and a pterosaur in a marine -o-rama. This alcove gives way to what 
could be considered the 'main attraction'- a full sized dynamic mount of 
_Saurophaganax_ attacking from behind the left shoulder of an _Apatosaurus_ 
Directly facing the two combatants is the "dinovator." It consists of two 
elevators and two stories from which to view this Jurassic event. One 
elevator takes you to the "belly of the beast" while the other takes you face 
to face with an unhappy _Apatosaurus_.
On the ground and in between this life and death struggle is a smaller scale 
struggle with an _Archeopteryx_ attempting to grasp a small mammal. 

Circling back past the marine exhibit, the Deinonychus exhibit and the 
Pentaceratops exhibit is the Paleozoic exhibit. It was likewise done quite 
well and features the genera you'd expect to see from the Permian of 
Oklahoma. Just beyond this is the large Allosaurus awaiting it's chance to 
dazzle and amaze. I don't know what they have planned for it but I suspect it 
will be pretty cool.

It should be noted that the prehistoric stuff takes up only one half of the 
building space. The other half is devoted to human history with emphasis on 
the early humans and later Indians who inhabited the area. Also very nice!

Having finished with the heavy liquid work and the requisite museum tour(s), 
I had two days of going through the collections where I collected some data 
on other Arundel related projects. More on that tomorrow if interest is still 
there. 

Cheers,

Tom

Thomas R. Lipka
Paleontological/Geological Studies
Tompaleo@aol.com