Amundsen High School
Chicago, Illinois
Connie Gaberick, 9th Grade

Amundsend High School - Global Village is a school within a school (freshman, soph, junior, and seniors). This is our 7th year as a small school. Our focus is on academic success, concern for the environment, self development, and exploring the city of Chicago resources. There are 400 students in this program. The wonderful, excited, and curios freshman from Global Village are the group of students who participated in this year's Dinosaur Expedition.

Student Questions:

1. What have you found and how does weather affect your work?
   
   GRAY: So far the coolest thing has been a new species of crocodile! However, we’ve found many bones from sauropod and therapod dinosaurs as well. We won’t know for sure until we get back to the lab, but I think we’ve already got some pretty good material from these two main kinds of dinosaurs that we find out here. The weather is very hot during the day, which can make the work a little difficult sometimes, but one gets used to it pretty quickly. The sandstorms can really make digging up dinosaurs unbearable, though one can work through all but the worst of them. Sand in the eyes – arrggggh!
   
   
2. How hot is it and where do you get water from?
   
   GRAY: I guess the daytime temperatures probably get up to about 115 degrees F this time of year, though the sand will heat up to about 150. We get our water from the city of Agadez, which is where all of our supplies are based. The water there is good and we make sure to bring plenty of it out, as some of us can drink 2 gallons a day in this heat.
   
   
3. How do you know where to search?
   
   SERENO: We look at a special kind of map called a geologic map that shows the ages of the rocks. We target certain-aged rocks, locate them on the map and go to the area to search for bones. The area to search can still be quite large, such as 25 miles x 10 miles.
   
   
4. How long does it take to find bones and how long does it take to put them together?
   
   GRAY: Finding the bones can take anywhere from minutes to months. Part of this is luck, but a lot of that has to do with having the knowledge of where to look, the skill to do it well and the manpower to do it efficiently. Putting them back together requires that you first take all the rock off of them, reconstruct the broken pieces and then make copies of the bones and recreate the ones that you don’t have for mounting. Once again most of this is a question of who is involved in the project and how many people are working on it. It will usually take at least a year or two.
   
   
5. Parent Question:
   How do you know how old the bones are?
   
   MILLER: Dating a dinosaur is tricky because you can’t date the actual dinosaur bones. Instead, you must date the rocks that are around them. There are two main kinds of rocks that we deal with. One kind is volcanic and the other is sedimentary (rocks left over by rivers and lakes). It is only possible to date the volcanic rocks, which is unfortunate because all dinosaurs are found in sedimentary rocks. However, if there are two sets of volcanic rocks surrounding the sedimentary rocks we find fossils in, we know that the age is between the ages of the volcanic rocks. That is one way that we do it!