Here's my first fossil finding in Mongolia. And these are dinosaur eggs. And um,
So here's one, a fairly complete one, and it's very oblong, and it's got tiny crenulated surfaces, so,
these are characteristics of eggs of oviraptor, which is a common dinosaur found here. Um,
Um, so, here's another, sorta, half an egg.
That's some, eggshell fragments here...
And then we got two more on this side, one here, the other one here. And then I also found a fifth one
while digging a little bit more. So this is probably a nest of oviraptor. And so today we're going to
try to get them out and collect them. So the way we do that is, in this case we'll take
a scratch awl and start digging around the bone, or around the fossil.
And basically you want to do that around the specimen like so. And, we'll start cutting underneath the fossils, as well
And, then we'll start a process called 'jacketing' where we use plaster and burlap
to cover the fossils so we can collect them and send it back to the Museum
for further study. So I'll be doing that for a while, and hopefully later today we can get this
out of the rock and the surrounding sediments.
So the toilet paper is used for easy separating out the jacket from the fossil when we prepare
the specimen in the lab at the Museum.
So, the toilet paper has multiple purposes out in the field.
So after TPing the fossil, we need to actually get the plaster and burlap ready to make a
jacket. So here, I'm mixing plaster into water, and Chen here is, um, dousing the burlap strips
in water so they take up plaster.
Alright, so the final part, putting burlap pieces or burlap strips on this specimen.