Project Exploration: Summer
Institute
Blog Excerpts from Robin Heyden
Project
Exploration is a non-profit science education
organization co-founded by paleontologist,
Paul Sereno and educator, Gabrielle Lyon. Pearson
Education and the family of Dr. Neil Campbell
recently made a donation to fund a special
Summer Institute program for science teachers. The
idea was to get science educators out
to the dinosaur-rich badlands of Montana
to conduct field work and work with practicing
scientists. In July, the inaugural
group of
"Neil Campbell Fellows" traveled
to eastern Montana to participate in a five-day
dinosaur dig with Paul, Gabrielle, and other
paleontologists and technicians. I
was lucky enough to be invited along and
the following blog chronicles the adventure.
-robin heyden |
Robin Heyden
Photo G. Lyon |
Dinosaur
Dig – Day 2
July
12, 2006
“Rock or bone?”
I can see now why the Montana
license plates advertise their state as “Big
Sky Country.” As we drove out this morning
from Glendive, I scanned the horizon - nothing
but open space in all directions. The road tapered
ahead to infinity and our white van felt like
a ship at sea under all of that sky. The enormous
expanse of sky takes up at least three quarters
of the view with the most amazing cloud formations
- huge puffs that beg to be described. There
is space and distance here on a scale not often
seen.
Yesterday was my first day
in the field. I joined the Project Exploration
crew a day into their Summer Institute session
(on Day 2), flying into Billings, Montana and
then driving three hours due-east to Glendive
in the Badlands, near the state border with North
Dakota.
The summer institute base is
Charley’s Bed & Breakfast Inn, nicely
located in Glendive, Montana just one hour from
the site. “The site” is a 30,000
acre cattle ranch, ideal for dinosaur digging
as it is on the Hell Creek Formation.
What is the Hell Creek
Formation?
Indeed, you may well ask. Thanks
to our sessions yesterday with expert paleontologists
and the boatload of reading we’ve been
working through, I think I can actually answer
that.
When dinosaurs first appeared
on earth, Pangaea was one big landmass. It started
to break up during the Mesozoic era with Laurasia
(North America and Asia) splitting off and wending
its way north and west by the end of the Cretaceous.
During the Jurassic, Eastern Montana and the
plains of North America were covered by a shallow,
inland sea (known as the Colorado Sea).
As the continents shifted,
the Rocky Mountains rose, and the polar ice caps
formed, that inland sea retreated leaving a swampy
shoreline behind in Eastern Montana. This lush,
shoreline lasted for only a moment, geologically
speaking, but it was during this period of time
that the last of the dinosaurs dominated the
scene. And, as the sea retreated further and
the dinosaurs neared extinction, it turned out
to also be a great place to become a fossil.
The silting action of a delta
accumulates layers over the dead remains of the
dinosaurs fossilizing and preserving them beautifully.
Hell Creek is the particular rock formation (a “formation” is
a large package of sediments that look similar
and contain a particular group of fossils) in
which these late Cretaceous dinosaur bones can
be found. And Eastern Montana is the perfect
spot to find the Hell Creek. The Montana rocks
are the right age, with semi arid land, lots
of erosion and almost no human habitation or
building.
The Lost in Time Ranch, includes
land with an abundance of exposed Hell Creek
formation. Or, as one of our expert paleontologists,
Dave Varricchio, says, “Dang, you’ve
got a lot of outcrop here!”
The ranch includes 30,000 square
acres. To get to the ranch, you turn off the
main road out of Wibaux, onto a dirt road marked “Pine
Unit Oil Field”. Eight miles on that dirt
road leads you to the ranch’s front door – another,
smaller dirt road marked with two uprights and
a crossbar of timber. Just like the Ponderosa.
The ranch house is a low-slung
affair surrounded by a few out buildings and
a big barn. Right now the Ranch is tended by
a young man named Jerrod Hagood. He works as
a foreman for the Ranch owner, herding cattle,
maintaining fences, and generally keeping an
eye on things.
We worked here at the B&B
in the morning, discussing and deciding on the
various teacher portfolio projects, talking about
the way to build them, and how they'd work with
students.
Hiking Out
At 11:30 we headed out to the
site. Lost in Time is only accessible via a 12-mile
dirt road. We bounced down smaller dirt access
roads on the ranch to get as close as possible
to the site. From there we hiked in to a spot
where there was outcrop (also known as exposed
rock) and did some
"prospecting"….which basically
means walking around looking for bones.
It's going to take all of us
awhile to get good at recognizing bones versus
rocks. The rocks have a sedimentary appearance
(sort of salt and pepper) whereas with the bones
display a characteristic bone pattern – small
holes and an osteo-appearance. They also have
a different heft to them and a more solid sound
when you tap them with a tool.
We hike out in pairs and threes,
each team includes a paleontologist or one of
Paul Sereno's technical assistants so we can
get advice as we move. It’s very difficult
to know exactly what we’re looking for
and what it is that we find. So the silence of
our search is regularly interrupted by the question
"Is this rock or bone?"
That first prospecting hike
for me was an eye-opener. Is this really the
way it’s done? No fancy equipment? No electronic
gizmo or new-fangled divining rod to lead us
to an ancient bone? We really just wander until
we stumble upon something interesting? It appears
that paleontology today is pretty much done the
way it was a hundred years ago. Patience and
sweat. Did I mention that it was 107 degrees
out there?
It also prompted me to wonder
about the macro versus the micro. Here I was
absorbed in scanning the rocks for bone fragments
but I realized I also needed to keep my eyes
on the horizon, looking at the overall formations,
remembering where I was, and where I was headed.
This felt like an important skill to develop
and something that would come more easily with
experience.
After awhile we all got better
at recognizing bone fragments. Most of the bones
we found were scattered fragments that don’t “go
in” (that is, lead to a more complete skeleton).
We also spotted some living animals – pronghorn,
rabbits, killdeer, sage grouse, indigo buntings,
and lots of insects. Plant life is pretty scrubby
(this is, after all extremely arid land) – sage
and lots of cacti. I could also see the dried
remains of what must have been an incredibly
beautiful spring flower bloom.
A Triceratops Once
Removed
After an hour of prospecting,
we got back in the vans and drove to another
site. Paul and Gabe had been told by the previous
ranch owner that an ex-ranch hand found (and
illegally removed) a triceratops skull from this
location a few years back. Paul had already staked
out the site (in the morning) and, sure enough,
they found indications of the removal (hastily
and inexpertly done) and other bones from the
same organism still there. Just under the first
layers of dirt, they found a 1989 newspaper that
the perpetrators had used to cover and mark the
site. We worked together for two hours to excavate
what was still exposed on the surface.
Excavation is painstaking work.
The tools are a small pick axe, an awl, and a
paintbrush. You carefully poke at the sandstone
to crumble it, then brush it away, then poke
some more. Always the familiar refrain, "rock
or bone?" Bit by bit we started to see the
shape of some bones. A scapula, maybe part of
a pubic bone. All gargantuan in size. It's really
amazing.
After two hours of this, we
had carved a trench around the remains and could
begin the see the shape of it. We added hardener
(water-based polymer) to the exposed bones and
then covered the site with a blue tarp and weighted
it with rocks.
With the site safely tucked
in, we hiked out and headed for dinner at a place
called Madhatters - which promises pub, grub,
and casinos. And then back to the Charley for
showers and sleep.
Dinosaur Dig – Day 3
July 13, 2006
We started this day with a
trip to the Makoshika State Park (Makoshika is
a word in the Sioux language that translates
to “bad earth”). This is an
ideal place to get a feel for the local geology
and how it all fits together.
First stop, the Visitor’s
Center. In addition to the well-stocked
gift store, they have an exhibit that explains
the advance and retreat of the inland marine
sea and the deposition of the Hell Creek formation. They
also have an impressive triceratops skull that
was found in the park in 1991. From there we
drove into the Park itself – miles of hiking
trails through beautiful country, laid out for
us like a living geology book.
Makoshika State Park lies at
the northwest end of the Cedar Creek anticline,
a 20-mile wide by 150-mile long area of uplifted,
layered rock. Each look-out spot places
you at a breathtaking vantage to see the formations
- odd-shaped sandstone knobs, cap rocks, cross
bedding, and buttes. You can clearly see the
role that wind and water erosion played to form
this landscape.
The KT Boundary
At the head of the Diane Gabriel
Trail (named after a paleontologist that worked
the formation here) we had our first official
sighting of the KT boundary. In this photo you
can see it as the topmost black band.
Alright now, let’s see
if I can take a stab at explaining this! The
KT boundary is the marker point between the Cretaceous
(K) and the Tertiary (T) periods (roughly 65
million years ago). Since the Cretaceous
was the last period of the Mesozoic Era and the
Tertiary was the first period of the Cenozoic
era, the KT boundary also marks the boundary
between eras. These between-era boundaries
in the geologic record correspond to times of
mass extinctions seen clearly in the fossil record. This
particular mass extinction doomed more than half
of all marine species and many plant and animal
groups, including most of the dinosaurs.
The KT boundary is actually
about 1500 cubic kilometers of debris, deposited
globally about 65 million years ago. One clue
to the Cretaceous mass extinction is the iridium
found in the clay of the KT boundary. Since
iridium is a very rare earth element but a very
abundant meteorite element, the presence of iridium
in this boundary layer indicates the extraterrestrial
origin of the material. This, in turn,
supports the hypothesis that a large asteroid
or comet collided with Earth roughly 65 million
years ago, forming a huge cloud of debris that
could have blocked sunlight and severely disturbed
the global climate. This collision and the subsequent
fallout, referred to as “the KT event”,
changed the environment of our entire planet
and altered the course of evolution.
On a lighter note, one can
not leave Makoshika State Park without noticing
the “Folf” course – no, that’s
not a typo. “Folf”, also known
as “Frisbee Golf”, is a legitimate
sport. It is played on a course of nine
or eighteen “holes”, with a tee off
point and a gong for each pole.
Players fly the frisbee from tee-off to gong,
to gong, to gong. They tally their throws
for the entire course and the lowest score wins. Who
knew?
Shells on land
From Makoshika, we made our
way back out to the Ranch and met up with Jerrod. Today
we were going to explore an older formation,
Bear Paw Shale. Bear Paw Shale is older
rock, laid down below (therefore, before) the
Hell Creek formation. In it can be found
marine invertebrate fossils, inhabitants of the
inland seaway that covered much of Montana so
many years ago.
We drove out to an area that
Paul and Gabrielle had previously marked with
their GPS units and began prospecting from a
central point. Do you remember how we “prospect? That’s
right – we each head out in different directions
from a central point, agreeing to meet back at
the vehicles within a given period (30 minutes
or an hour). Prospecting is really a semi-organized
form of wandering while paying attention.
So, off we went. I didn’t
take more than 10 steps before I found a rock
that looked suspiciously like a shell. I
bent over, picked it up, and rolled it in my
hand. Sure enough, it was a bivalve fossil! Some
distant relation to today’s clam or mussel,
deposited at the bottom of an ancient sea during
the age of dinosaurs, and here it was – in
my hand.
The rest of the prospecting
trip was just like that.
We all found many fossils – nautiloids,
ammonoids (relatives to the modern day nautilus),
and bivalves. There they were just lying
on the ground!
Some were embedded in rocks, some were isolated.
For bad earth, it was a very
good day.
Dinosaur Dig – Day 4
July 14, 2006
Planning and boy scouts
We started out the day with
group work on the future of the Project Exploration
Summer Institute. Gabe asked for help from the
five Neil Campbell fellows thinking through the
goals, expected outcomes, the application and
recruitment process for the program’s future. As
usual, the group of teachers had terrific ideas
and came up with very useful suggestions and
plans.
From that session we drove
out to the ranch to hook up with a group of boy
scouts (6th and 7th graders)
who had been prospecting with Paul in the morning. We
brought them their lunches and heard their stories
from the field –
“Wow, it’s
HOT out there....do you have any caffeinated
soda?”
“We saw bones in
the ground!”
“Do you do this every
day?”
It was fun to see their enthusiasm
and it made us all eager to get out there.
How do you know where
you’re going?
After lunch we headed to a
new location where Ray had spotted a vertebrae
poking out of the ground. He had excavated enough
to see that it was a more recent bone, most likely
a bison, and to find a long bone nearby. That
was enough to make it worth investigating.
Bumping over ruts and trails
we got close to the site and then walked in. As
we walked to the site, I asked Paul what he does
when he is prospecting. I was still mulling
over the micro/macro question and was curious
to understand what his years in the field had
taught him about locating the right sites. He
explained that he usually takes a GPS point on
his parked vehicle and then heads out. By
doing this, he can safely ignore the path he
came by and how to get back. This frees him up
to pay attention to his forward direction. As
he walks, he constantly scans, looking for the
right kind of outcrop, checking for sloping rock
(as opposed to vertical), while at the same time
looking closely for exposed bone or anything
out of the ordinary. He walks quickly (I
was having trouble keeping up with him) like
a man who knows exactly where he is headed. You
can almost hear the wheels turning in his brain
as he moves.
Global Positioning Systems
(GPS) have revolutionized paleontology. It
used to be that field workers had to rely completely
on their hand compasses, their notes and descriptions
of a location. Paul recollected when he
found his first significant site in Africa (before
the advent of GPS), he very anxious about being
able to find it again. He took a compass
reading at the road and then set the jeep’s
odometer to zero and drove (overland) to the
site. He repeated this process a number
of times to make sure the reading was accurate. Then
he took polaroid shots looking out from the site
in all four ordinate directions. He said
he kept scanning the horizon, double checking
the odometer, looking for landmarks
– he was so worried that he wouldn’t
be able to get back to it.
There’s no doubt that
GPS units are the most significant new tool in
the paleontologist’s toolkit. In
addition to providing coordinates that others
can follow and being able to pinpoint the location
of a colleague, they allow you to more loosely
prospect a large area. You can head out in a
variety of directions; mark likely spots, and
then, after you’ve seen a number of possible
sites, decide which one is worth going back to.
Going in
Once we got to the new site,
Paul explained the significance of what we were
seeing. First, and most importantly, the bones
are “going in”. That is, as
you dig into the section, you find more bone.
That indicates that the exposed bone Ray spotted
is just the tip of the iceberg and the rest has
yet to be unearthed. Next significant indicator,
there was a foramen (or hole) in the vertebra
which tells us that this is a cervical vertebra. Next
point, they found another vertebra, articulated
(that is, right next to it, in place) with the
exposed first one. This is important because
the only way you could find an articulated skeleton
in the ground is if this spot was the animal’s
final resting place. It died here, was
buried here, and hasn’t been disturbed
since.
Further evidence for articulation
was found with the nearby long bones. As
Paul explained, we want this to be a right forelimb.
Given the way the skeleton is buried and the
lay of the land, we’re more likely to find
the rest of the animal buried if this long bone
was its right fore limb. By examining the
specimen more closely, Paul could see that the
radius was on the outside, the ulna on the inside.
Therefore (whew), it is the animal’s right
forelimb.
So how did they know that this
was a bison? We found a long spinal process,
near the vertebrae. Bison (and horses)
have long spinal processes on their withers. Also,
the long bones have growth caps
– dinosaurs don’t have growth caps
but mammals do. They can also tell that
these bones haven’t completely fossilized
yet. The bones on this site are what you
might call “sub fossils”. They
are lighter and younger – most likely somewhere
between 200 and 1000 years old. The only
way we’ll know for sure is to radiometrically
date the bones back at the lab.
But first, we’ve got
to get it out of the ground. We started
with shovels on the grassy tufts on top. Once
we got down to sand, we began with awls, brushes,
and scoopers. We removed the top layers
of sand and dug around the edges, to determine
the perimeter of the animal. Once we got
close to the layer where the first bones were
found, we switched to finer tools and more precise
movements. Poking gently, removing small
pieces and handfuls, and always, always, always
keeping the site clean.
As Ray and Andy kept telling us, “a clean
site is a good site.” You have to
constantly brush away the sand in order to see
what’s there and avoid touching or damaging
bone.
After about two hours of this,
I finally found what I thought was a piece of
bone. I called Paul over to look while
I reached in to brush it off with a gloved finger. He
reminded me to use the small paint brush; even
my glove could scratch or damage it (watching
Paul’s team work, you see the most interesting
combination of brute force and delicate care). Gently
and slowly, Paul brushed, picked and blew on
the area until we could see the smooth surface
of another vertebra – articulated with
the last one. Victory!!!
When Gabe announced that it
was time to break for the day we were all disappointed.
If we could just dig for a big longer, we could
see more of the animal and finally get a complete
feel for it. I checked my watch (pushing the
dust off it first to see the clock face) and
was shocked to discover it was after 7:00 pm.
The time had flown by. We sprinkled the exposed
bones with hardener, covered the site with a
blue tarp, weighted it down with rocks, and said
good-bye to our bison. A team would come back
to this site later and complete what we had started. Eventually,
the bones would be meticulously covered in tin
foil, cast in plaster, carefully lifted from
the site, and even more carefully transferred
back to Paul’s lab at University of Chicago.
We had our last dinner together
at the Rainbow Room in Wibaux and then headed
home to Glendive for the night. Tomorrow,
we’d all be flying back to our homes and
families. I knew we’d be taking a
whole lot more back with us than dirty clothes
and a few marine fossils carefully wrapped in
our suitcases.
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More on the Science Teacher Field Institute
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Download the 2008 Science Teacher Field Institute Application forms.
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Watch the Science Teacher Field Institute Video.
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Read the history of Project Exploration’s Science Teacher Field Institute.
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View snapshots from the Science Teacher Field Institute.
Science Teacher Field Institute in the News
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