So as a paleontologist, your fieldwork often goes in two major phases. One being the prospecting
phase, which is what I'm doing now, and the other being the excavation phase. So during
the prospecting phase, the crew members spread out and try to look for any exposed fossils.
So we look down and walk for miles and miles. So during the prospecting phase, the tools
we generally use include a scratch awl so you can pick out a rock or a fossil as such. A
brush to brush away some of the sediment gently. And then we have a geologist's best friend
- the rock hammer to remove more rock but definitely less gentle than the brush. And
some of the other things we bring include a specimen bag, so we can put some of the
smaller specimens that we find walking around, and then show it to the other group members.
And theres our field notebook, so it's got illustrations of the site that I was working
on the last two days, and then some GPS coordinates so we know where we find each of the specimens.
And then last but not least we also carry around a GPS device so we don't get lost.
You can definitely get carried away just looking down and walking. So it's good to keep the
GPS handy so that we don't get lost.
I found some bone fragments, which you see all over this locality. And so paleontological
field work almost always involves finding these fragmentary bones, these shattered bones,
and its almost never like how it was depicted in the film Jurassic Park where you see a
complete skeleton of a dinosaur buried underground. And we also don't use some sort of seismic
devices to look for fossils, because the resolution - at least with current technology - is not
good enough to locate precise locations of fossils. So we just rely on our feet and our
eyes to discover new fossils. And so you see a lot of chunks of bones like these in the
small section of this butte. Let's keep climbing up, and follow these bones. So these bones
are pretty unidentifiable. A lot of them are from limb bones but beyond that its hard to
tell what the bones are, and to which dinosaur it belongs to. Oh, there's some more bones!
Ok, these are bigger chunks but these are still fragmented, so this might be coming
from a femur or your thigh bone, but again it's somewhat difficult to tell from these chunks.
But one thing that can be sure of is that it came from a pretty large animal,
from a Tyrannosaur, Alioramus, which was discovered by a AMNH team a few years ago.
One of the tricky things in paleontological fieldwork is making sure that you actually
have a fossil. So here, on the ground we have a nice looking tooth row. But this is from
an animal that, actually a mammal, probably a camel that died very recently. And it's
been picked probably by other animals and scavenged. But initially it does look like
a fossil. But you can see that it's still made up of the original biological composition
of bone. It hasn't undergone through a fossilization process which involves a replacement or the
of the original composition of the bone, or the invasion by additional minerals that seeps
into the bone. And since it hasn't gone through those processes, this is not a fossil. We're
looking for things that are millions of years old. In our case, over 60-70 million years ago.