What were the critters...
[Jessica] Pack rats. [Jeff] Pack rats!
Little bitty turds.
[Jessica] Actually good sized. [Jeff] And a lot of urine.
[Jessica]A lot of urine.
And this was on top of the specimens
that were in the little boxes.
So who are you going to call?
Jessica and Jeff.
Crud Busters.
The vertebrate paleontology collection had been neglected
for about 23 years.
The program from the ground up
was built by Professor John Lance
and the person who replaced him was
Dr. Everett Lindsay.
And I got my master's under him,
but when he retired, that was
when the university did not replace him.
So the entire vertebrate paleontology program
just simply came to a screaming
halt.
Jeff had moved here from Illinois
and was already starting on the incredible
undertaking of cleaning and reorganizing the vertebrate
paleontology collection, which had been neglected.
What Jeff started then I came on board a year
after you were still breathing packrat poops.
We■re fossils curating fossils.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm Lynne Shepartz
and I'm the newly appointed collections
manager for this, which is the paleontological collection
of the University of Arizona, which is now part of the
Desert Laboratory.
We■re the repository of,
I would say, about 20,000 fossils.
And these range
from some very early materials that are dinosaurs.
Examples of dinosaur skin, the impressions left.
We have a lot of particularly mammoths in our collection.
This is the pelvis of a young male mammoth.
Most of our collection, and the biggest emphasis in
terms of research, has been on some of the later time periods.
And this is sort of the times of the megafauna
where you have large elephant like creatures, the mastodons
and the mammoths, and you have large camels
that were living right here in the southwest.
So this is part of the skull of a camel.
There's a rich history of camel
forms that originated in the Americas.
We also have something that some people might
shy away from studying and that is, to put it
bluntly, fossil turds or coprolites
and people were quite fascinated with these.
We can learn a lot from their contents about what
the animal was eating.
The sites where there is evidence of paleo
humans hunting giant animals like mammoths.
Many of those sites are from the southwest.
This lab has this great collection of faunal
material from the Pleistocene, which is really useful
if you're studying a site
and you want to make identifications
and figure out what animals are present at your site.
Some of them
look like
from extinct animals, and I need to make identifications
to figure out what animal they're from.
So I've spent a lot of time just comparing what I have with
what's here.
I've identified camel teeth.
There's a mammoth tooth recovered from the site as well,
and there's plenty of mammoth material
here to compare it with.
I've learned a lot from Jeff and Jessica
about what it is to manage collections, and I realized
there's a lot more to it
than just looking at bones and so forth.
This this isn't a very fancy room.
You can tell, but it was so lively
when Jeff and I were graduate students.
I am confident, not just hoping, confident
that we're going to get a new crop of graduate students
up here to study all this wonderful material
that was left to molder for 20 odd years.
And now it's having its own
renaissance.