Dinosaur bones, up close and personal

Today was a great day. The weather was nice, not as hot as yesterday, but the content was great.

We spent the day at the dinosaur center, touring the museum and got to go up the hill to the dig site, and finished up with working on our own sets of bones, cleaning them up in the lab. That's what we'll be spending most of the week on, and we were all anxious to start.

The dig site is owned by an individual, but the non profit and the for profit museum house most of his collection and help educate the locals as well as a lot of tourists. The dig site is only open for about 2 1/2 months a year, because of the weather. And the summer weather up there has temps at 115 degrees. So I'll not be volunteering to work up there anytime soon. But we did see a couple of sites that are not buttoned up for the winter, and got to walk around looking for bones. I found some pretty rocks, and a nodule formed by bacteria at the "death site". Peggy helped find a bone, sticking out of the side of the hill. They will go back and survey it's location (they use a total station) and preserve it in place until they can remove it. They actually do cast many bones and remove them to the museum. They have a big backlog in the lab.

We are getting trained to clean and preserved the bones. So far we are allowed to use a toothbrush and dental pick. We'll spend all day tomorrow in the lab, using these tools and water to clean off the "matrix" from the bone (fossil). It is very cool. Peggy and I are sitting in front of the windows that people can see thru from the museum. They do have small air tools, and a sandblaster that we might get to use.

We keep a log, of what we do, what happens, etc. These bones are all from the back of some kind of sauropod. There are three kinds that they have in this formation (the Morrison formation) one of which is an apatosaurous. That is basically a big one, what we called a brontosaurous when I was a kid.

We are all in hog heaven. This is way cool. We'll see how we feel after a week of this.

Thermopolis is small, so Peggy and I have been doing a lot of walking. We plan to bike some between places tomorrow.

As usual, the elderhostelers are very interesting people, lots of fun. The lunch at the senior center is not great, but dinner tonight at one of the three restaurants in town was very good. Not haute cuisine, but pretty good for Wyoming.

Anne