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October 8, 2000
6:00am, October 7
The last few days at
Camp 1 were consumed by a storm of plaster
and packing. On the horizon: a new area
awaiting our prospection; immediately before
us: the work at hand -excavating the titanosaur
and packing up camp.
On the 7th
of October, we split into three teams: one
to break down camp and organize supplies,
one to finish the titanosaur site, and one
to load the heaviest of the jackets on to
the truck. With a 36-hour effort we completed
excavation in the pit, broke down Camp 1,
displaced 1000 gallons of water north, loaded
15 tons of fossils, and set up Camp 2.
4:00pm, October 7
The force of nine people
using all their might was necessary to turn
the "mummy" jacket over in the titanosaur
site. Excavation of the titanosaur was formidable:
as the bones progressed, they dove deeper
into the ground and the rock surrounding
the bones got harder. The last three days
at the site consisted almost entirely of
pick axing and shoveling.
The titanosaur was found
late in the prospecting session but was
important enough a specimen that we decided
to collect it. Titanosaurs are the most
wide-spread Cretaceous long-necked plant-eating
dinosaurs. Only one other associated skeleton
has been described from Africa, Malawisaurus,
from Malawi. The bones we uncovered
will be an important addition to the story
of the evolution of long-necked plant-eaters.
7:00am, October 8
Hans tightens a blue
safety strap around a thousand-pound Nigersaurus
jacket. Just a day after being jacketed,
the large "mummy" jacket - containing the
mid-region vertebrae and so nicknamed for
its resemblance to a sarcophagus - is one
of the last of the large field jackets to
be loaded onto the "big truck."
Most of the large jackets
were well beyond the capabilities of our
Land Rovers and so we enlisted the assistance
of Tinnemoun - an Agadez "commersant" specializing
in desert trucking. One of his 30-foot-long
desert-hardy flatbeds was just what we needed
to drop 1000 gallons of water at Camp 2,
and get the 15 tons of fossils collected
at Camp 1 out of the desert.
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