the traumador quarry... (origins part 3)

so it turns out that my being discovered as an egg was part of a nearly 100 year long saga...

i still have a lot of questions, but at least i know a few of the facts...

here's the short version of the saga (if you want the longer version click the link).

a very mysterious fossil hunter named francis slate operating during the great canadian dinosaur rush SEEMS to have found the site both me and my mother were found at (i say seems as this mr. slate isn't in any proper history book). than in the 1940's my mom was officially found, but my egg (and those of my long dead brothers and sisters) remained in the ground undiscovered. it wasn't until 2003 that my eventual discoverer craig returned to the site and stumbled across my nest...

of all things i've wanted to know about myself, is where did i come from?... of course the saying "where did i come from" has a lot of meanings... but today at the top of my list was the simplest meaning. what was the place i came from?

after many years of wondering, today i no longer have too!

not only did i make it to where i came from, but i was being guided through it by the one and only darren tanke! the guru expert on the history of fossil collecting in alberta.

this morning we ventured to just outside the town of huxley, alberta. the spot was on a isolated ranch like any other in the praries. only this one was bordered with the natural walls of the badlands at one end.

after getting out of the car, darren casually asked me what i notice immediately about the area of remote badlands around us...


looking around what did i notice... not much. just a stretch of badlands very similar to those around drumheller or dinosaur park. i could have been anywhere along the red deer river...

that was till after a minute or two. i realized there was something funny about the top of the outcrop. i guess funny isn't the right word (especially when i figured out exactly what it is). it was a very pronounced and distinct layer. i'd never seen one like it before.

after another minute of thought i realized what i was looking at. i was face to face with the only record of what happened to my kind 65 million years ago. it was THE KT boundary! the layer found throughout the world that marked the end of cretaceous period, and with it the doom of the dinosaurs. (like i said not such a funny layer in the end!).

i have an intense fear of this moment of time. even if it was 65 million years ago. asteroids always fall on me in my worst nightmares. yet looking at it here in the rock it was deceivingly calm and mellow. one could almost believe it wasn't the marker of one of the most disastrous moments in the earth's history, the way it just sat there doing nothing. yet recorded in that layer is an insane amount of destruction (global forest fires, molten rock rain, massive tidal waves... you know the end of the world type stuff).

i shared my findings with darren, who was quite impressed. "good eye," he complimented me. darren than asked me pointedly"but is that all you noticed?"

"yeah," i truthfully told him, a little embarrassed. i thought i'd done really well, but apparently not.

darren pointed to a spot just in front of us. "right there," darren instructed me as he handed me a picture. "what do you notice about it compared to this photo."

it was the photo darren had shown me yesterday, of that unknown explorer francis slate digging at the site i'd be found at years later.

what about it? i thought. this photo was marked on the back as being taken in 1914. that was ages ago (95 years if you spend the time to do the math i realized). a lot has changed since then...

hasn't it? i reasked myself as my tiny brain caught onto what darren was leading me towards...

i was standing RIGHT where the photographer had been standing! right there in front of me was the VERY spot francis slate had reported finding "saurian eggs of unknown nature".

that was amazing!

i turned to darren all excited and started to ask a million questions... mostly about how did he find this site, and how could a photo almost a hundred years old still be a clue.

after a few minutes calming me down, darren answered my many questions.

for the last 10 or so years darren has taken it upon himself to find all the various dig sites in alberta, those that are a century old or older all the way up to the present so that a solid record can be preserved for the science of palaeontology for centuries to come... (details on darren's techniques and findings are coming NEXT post so stay tuned). using clues like this photograph darren is able to find even the most obscure of quarrys.

of course darren is only just one man. he can't possible hunt all the badlands of alberta alone, so he recruits people to help him out in searching for these "lost quarrys" (as they are now lost to us in the present). after all more eyes are better than two... wait is that how that saying goes?

he told me the story of one particular helper, who took an interest in the field notes of francis slate, and managed to track down this site we stood at.

that person was of course (soon after the events in this flashback to become) my legal guardian craig.

5 years ago...

francis slate had been getting the better of craig for the whole summer of 2003. not that he was wholeheartedly looking at first. normal lost quarrys can be searched for as a side project during normal field work. not with this slate guy.

_

darren had only managed to ever track down one of slate's sites back in 2000 (and he spent that whole summer looking!). that was because it was in an easy place. right outside the atlas coal mine's visitor centre, the atlas being a major tourist attraction in the drumheller region. with this difficulty in mind darren urged craig to drop it, and try looking for "normal" lost quarrys.

_

yet craig grew infuriated (darren didn't know why, but it seemed craig took it personally). he dropped all his other commitments at the museum in august, and went out with the sole purpose of finding some of francis slate's dig sites. this wasn't just a day job, it became craig's life for that period. by day he'd wander and drive around the badlands, and come back at night to read and research till he HAD to sleep.

_

despite this craig came back empty handed for two weeks in a row. than on august. 14 a lucky break. while reading through charlie sternberg's notes for any reference to slate, craig stumbled on sternberg mentioning a visit he made in 1946 to a site slate had spoken to him about in 1914.

which if course was the spot that i now stood in here in the year 2009.

craig's site check for lost quarry clues ended very quick when he found fossils on the surface. a type he'd never seen in the field before... eggshell!

as he poked around (being careful not to remove anything from the rock, as that could damage delicate fossils) he was surprised to find the eroded out remains of several eggs... a nest he concluded!

if he was surprised at that, he was amazed (and darren tells me a bit freaked) when one of the eggs popped out of the mound as he probed around it. craig grabbed it as it nearly rolled down to possible destruction... he was astounded at how intacted a egg it was. it was perfect in every way. no cracks, no damage, not even the slightest clue of fossilization even. it was even light weight and still proper egg shell coloured.

just as he was about to try and set it down carefully on the ground it suddenly started to shack and crack itself open...

this is about where i can jump in and add my point of view...

this is about how i remember this happening. which is pretty easy for me to remember. not only is it my first memory, but as we tyrannosaurs are closely related to birds we imprint on the first thing we see just like them. so the image of craig's very surprised face is rather hardly ingrained in my mind (as small as it is).

not much of a view of my birthplace at the time though, mind you. just some nice sky and a big human...

that's how it all began... well for me anyway. here in this place 5 years ago...

as i looked upon it, half imagining what happened and half remembering it, all kinds of deep huge emotion swelled up inside me. i caught myself trying to cry. which was silly.

not because darren was there (he told me afterwards it was touching, and one of the most significant moments he's had showing some lost quarrys... though i was outdone by the daughter of one of levi sternberg's fieldcrew members when he showed her some pictures of her father she'd never seen).

silly because we tyrannosaurs can't cry properly! another one of those human behaviours i've picked up from hanging out with them so much. (and imprinting on one as we've just seen). i wished i could cry at that moment thouhh. this was a rare instance i'd be crying due to happiness!

its funny. i didn't have much more information on how i was found due to this field tri[, but now that i'd been to THE place i felt more connected to my origin. isn't it always funny how you can imagine or see pictures of something, it just isn't anywhere near as cool as seeing the real thing, is it?!?

now that he'd done a huge favour for me, it was time i did something for darren back. more to the point something that could help us both out. i was going to pick up where craig and he had left off, and find out more about this francis slate!

there was only one thing. i didn't know how to find lost quarrys... good thing i was with the guy who invented how to look for them!

next: how to find a lost quarry!

a complex story (origins part 2)

(Production Note: Much of the content of this post is fictional, and not actually research Darren Tanke is engaging in. Please take this made up stuff in the spirit it is meant (and not harass or blame Mr. Tanke over OUR artistic license). We will be covering Darren's real research (which the fiction in this post is an exaggeration of) very shortly in the continuation of this storyline. Prehistoric Insanity)

with no obvious point behind the present that has returned me home, i've decided to create a purpose for the trip.

while i currently have access to one of the world's greatest palaeontologic institutions, i'm going to find out everything i can about how my egg was found and hatched.

now, there's a lot of details one can look into about any specific fossil...

• where was it found?


• who found it?


• how did they find it?


• how long until it was dug up?


• who was on the field team that did the digging?


• how long did the dig take?


• how long till the fossil was prepared (that's a fancy word for cleaned off)?


• who did the preparing?


• who studied the fossil?

etc.

and this is only when you don't have a personal stake or connection to the fossil... which in this case i think i would have!

if there was one man at the museum who could help me with these questions, it was technician extraordinaire darren tanke. who thought i was just popping by his nook in the preparation lab to say hi... boy was he in for a surprise. i had like a million questions for him!

after the necessary catch up (like everyone darren was very interested to hear about my new zealand adventures... in particular my encounters with professor paradigm for some reason) i tried to present my current quest in a rational manner... which sadly with my brain capacity, and how excited i was to maybe get some answers wasn't so rational, but darren being the really clever guy he is figured out what i wanted to ask him.

now for those of you who haven't heard of darren tanke, well how to put it? as far as dinosaurs and palaeontology are concerned he is kinda a big deal!

darren started working at the tyrrell musuem a couple years before there technical WAS a museum (the alberta government had decided it was starting it up, but assembled the staff before the building was completed), and is now the longest serving staff member at the museum!

though he technically isn't a true palaeontologist (in that he never got a PHD) i think saying this, even though it is a fact, is kinda insulting. darren publishes more papers and articles a year than 2 or 3 of your average palaeontologists combined! he is an expert on ceratopsians, dinosaur pathology (that's fancy wording for dino injuries and illness), and the history of alberta's palaeontology. on top of that he is among the best of the best when it comes to digging up and/or preparing fossils.

_

it was darren's expertise in the history of alberta's fossil hunting in particular that i thought would help me the most at moment though. darren has made it his mission to try and track down every scientific dig site located in alberta. it helps that he has been on like half of them (well not really, but a lot). however making the job harder for him is that most of the early fossil hunters in the province didn't really record where they dug beyond vague references of general regions.

_

to solve this darren has become a quarry hunter. using clues such as pictures taken of these old digs, garbage left behind, and their old camp sites darren has been tracking down 5-10 of these old dig sites a year. along the way he has become an expert on not only who was working in alberta, but what has been dug up as well!

_

before talking to darren and having him fill in many of the gaps in the story, here is what i knew about my own discovery...

back sometime in the 1946 my mother (pictured here) was found by someone near the town of huxley alberta (about an hour north of drumheller). however due to the extreme nature of the site mommy was found at, they couldn't excavate (that's fancy wording for dug up) her at the time. so she was just left there. it wasn't till the early 80's when the tyrrell museum started active field expeditions that she was finally dug up. a team under the legendary phil currie (including darren!) finally rescued her from millions of years burial...

_

however this is only part of the story. afterall i'm not my mom. she was cleaned off and put up in the museum a good decade before i too was unearthed...

_

i know that my legal guardian craig discovered me by going back to my mom's site, and found my egg just below where she'd been taken out. the thing is though, that's about all i know...

_

i have reason to believe it is a way more interesting story though. my main clue is this old photo. it is labelled as being taken the day before i was found. you'll note not only is craig in the photo, but also my JERK! of a cousin, larry... what larry is doing there i have no clue...

_

this was the key part of the story i was very keen to learn. which i was hoping darren could help me with.

_

"the huxley site," darren seemed off put when i asked him. not by me mind you, rather the site i asked for. "it's just been a while since i actively looked into that one. it's not your normal site that one... just let me get my files on it."

_

darren went to work on his puter, and next thing you know i had all sorts of other facts to flesh out the story of my discovery.

_

to start off with in the museum's records, me and my mom are not known by our names. rather we have special collection numbers assigned to us. these as so that the museum can keep track of us in their huge collections, and scientists can refer to us specially and everyone will know what they mean (though why our names don't work for this purpose i'm not sure??).

_

my mom is TMP 81. 12. 1. which doesn't make a lot of sense if you don't know the tyrrell's numbering system. all museums have different cataloguing systems, but they usually involve numbers.

_

in the tyrrell's case these numbers mean something. TMP stands for tyrrell museum of palaeontology (the museum hadn't gotten the royal retitle when they started their collections so hence the lack of an R on the front). the 81 means mom was dug up in 1981, and this way you know when anything at the museum was dug up immediately. the 12 indicates that huxley was the 12th location the museum dug at, as the museum gives their fossil sites numbers to help keep track of where fossils are found. finally the 1 means mom was the first fossil found at the site.

_

i already knew this, but for you on the innerweb my number is TMP-2003. 12. 7. see if you can figure out what that means?

_

the right answer is i was found in 2003, august. 16 to be precise (my hatching day!) though the number won't tell you that. i was found at the 12th quarry in alberta aka. huxley, and i was the 7th specimen extracted (i was egg 6 out of 10... so as mom was number one, the last of those eggs in the nest was TMP- 2003. 12. 11).

_

next i got all sorts of facts about how mom was dug up. she was fossilized in the layer just below the KT boundary itself!... meaning both of us were literally among the last of the tyrannosaurs ever!...

fun fact this spot in huxley is one of the ONLY sites in all of alberta where the KT boundary is exposed! so it was really lucky we were buried there and not somewhere else...

_

(Production Note: Photo from Royal Tyrrell Museum Finders: A Century of Fossil Hunting in Alberta)

_

in the present, she was exposed halfway up a sheer cliff, and was only noticed due to some broken off chunks that had tumbled to the bottom through erosion. the height and steepness of this cliff proved too much for the limited field crew of mom's discoverer charles mortram sternberg, and she had to be left where they found her.

fortunately she was encased in solid ironstone so erosion was considerable slowed down, meaning mom could be left for quite sometime without too much worry of lose or damage to her skeleton. sternberg recorded this find, and hoped someone would return when the resources and manpower were available.

_

sadly this didn't happen till nearly 45 years later, when in 1981 phil currie of the tyrrell noted the find in sternberg's notes and organized a sizeable dig team. it was an ordeal, as the crew had to dig from the top of the cliff down nearly 30 metres to her skeleton (all this cliff material being called over burden as it was over top of the fossil in question and naturally a burden to remove!).

_

with this rather deep quarry there was constant danger of the cliff collapsing on the dig team, and with the majority of her body safely removed dr. currie reluctantly had to leave mom's head in the side of the hill. his worries proved correct as a few years later the quarry did slump, and had anyone been digging there they'd have been buried along with my mom's head!

_

poor mom though. i don't know what i'd do without my head. fortunately they were able to lend her a cast skull of another t-rex from montana!

_

this ended the clear part of the story, and the transition into the weirder part was marked by darren drawing out an annoyed "right," i looked at him puzzled. he turned to me with a slightly serious face. "remember how i said there were some weird things about huxley? that's because they tie into the commission."

_

"the what?" i asked.

_

"the dominion's palaeontologic commission," darren stated. than he threw a glance to the door, as though to make sure no one was listening in. "the precursor to palaeo central."

_

"you know about palaeo central?!?" i almost yelled in excitement.

_

darren shushed me with his finger. "no i don't know about them," he stated in a rather formal manner. he once again looked to the door, than satisfied no one was listening whispered. "no one knows about them. they officially don't exist, but if you've been working in palaeontology as long as me their activities become pretty obvious."

_

man did i have a ton of questions for darren now, but he refused to answer any of them. "look traumador, i understand if you just learned about them you'll want to know all about the, but trust me you don't really. the more you know the more you could risk compromising them and their operations. the palaeo central initiative is the only sure line of defense fossils have at the moment."

_

despite this slightly downer of a warning, darren winked at me "at the same time you can start to figure out some things about them, the same way i did," darren offered, and reached into one of his filing cabinets.

"i can even give you these without arising too much suspicion," darren assured himself. "as these documents pertain to your discovery."

_

which brought us back on tangent with why i was here. only now it had a hint of super spy excitement. what did my discovery have to do with palaeo central?

_

well it turns out it wasn't a direct link, and didn't have to do with palaeo central of professor paradigm really at all.

rather these documents came from way back in the early days of alberta palaeontology. the 1910's to be exact.

_

that was the time of great fossil hunters seriously prospecting and collecting in the badlands of alberta for fossils (though not the first time, it was just the first big effort to do so). in an era known as the great canadian dinosaur rush. back than teams from new york and ottawa competed (in a friendly manner mind you) to find and collect dinosaurs from the red deer river valley. as the rush is a big topic, my next post will be on it so i can stay on subject here. so stay tuned.

_

that's the general story though. two crews working the badlands, and finding lots of canadian dinosaurs. or at least that's the general official story. my heart started to race as i read on in darren's papers to find out it wasn't the whole story...

_

in the documents a whole new chapter to this era of palaeo history was added. while the famous exploits of the two teams were going on in the public eye, on the fringe there was something more ominous going down. in 1912 the canadian geologic survey detected activities by a third player. an european aristocrat by the name of lord antonin annex.

_

darren was able to track down some letters from the survey to the british colonel office. the letters claimed this annex guy had his own agents working in alberta, who were digging up fossils and than smuggling them back to central europe to his private collect. the survey implored the british to assist them.

_

it was at this point the story ended. well at least in the papers in front of me... "hey what happened next?" i demanded of papers, not darren mind you. i was just annoyed as though i'd only gotten half a book, and it cut out at the best part.

_

darren grinned at me. "officially nothing," he typed something into the computer. "the british colonel office never replied, and these 'accusations' against annex were never proven."

_

"however try and look anything up from this period in the geologic survey's database and," darren explained as he hit a key. instead of access to the database, he got an access denied pop up requesting a user name and password. "kinda funny don't you think. what with this being a public database and all. i never would have found out a thing if i hadn't tracked down those hardcopies. "
_

"here is what happened next in 1912, as best i can put together," darren offered.

_

the colonial office did respond. though they were unable to take direct action against annex or his country due to the growing tensions that would explode into world war 1. however they were able to give the survey the resources it needed to deal with the situation internally. thus was born the dominion's (canada was called the dominion back than) palaeontologic commission.

_

"that sounds just like..." i started to say, meaning to say palaeo central.

_

darren cut me off agreeing with me. "yes, it does doesn't it."

_

darren flipped to what looked like some boring notes in a geologic survey manifest. they weren't boring at all on closer inspection though! they were chronological notes of the palaeontologic commission activities for the years 1912 through 1917...

_

"again, someone went to a lot of trouble to bury or cover up this organization," darren cautioned me. i could just picture professor paradigm with a big vault or something like one, stuffed full of books and paper. "i was just lucky enough to stumble across these summary notes taken by a secretary during a meeting somewhere. they weren't supposed to be taken. i suspect they were written as reminders for a bigger summary."

_

according to the notes, there'd been a secret battle going on in the back ground of the dinosaur rush. as the legitimate fossil hunters scoured the badlands, covertly so were people working for this lord annex. these "annex" agents got away with a lot in the first two years of the dinosaur rush...

_

lord annex had 14 skeletons dug up and smuggled to him (none of which have yet been accounted for). his agents sabotaged the legitimate crew's efforts, tried to play the them off each other, and even on occasion stole their fossils from under their own noses. that is till this palaeontologic commission began operations.

_

suddenly there was a counter-attack against annex's people in the badlands. there were a lot of exploits by the commission, but sadly these were only recorded in darren's book as one sentence summaries. many were very tantalizing, but of course lacking any details. after a couple of minutes the records for july 1914 caught my attention.

_

annex's men had been driven away from what would one day be dinosaur provincial park, and so they moved their operations up north. the society followed him, and this took them to around huxley!

_

"well done," darren smiled when i shoved the page with the reference in his face. "i wondered if you'd find that part."

_

darren handed me an official geologic field report with this photo attached. there was something about the picture that i found funny. i couldn't put my finger on it, but i'm sure i stared at it, as darren asked. "recognize it?"

_

"should i?" i answered with a question not looking up. the picture had me enthralled. i did feel as though it was familiar...

"you tell me," darren responded. "it is where you were born."

i looked up at darren and i'm sure my jaw dropped. that made no sense! how was it there was a photo of people working at my egg site almost a hundred years ago?!?

"remember how i told you a second ago charlie sternberg found this site in 1946. well i know as a matter of a fact that is almost the truth," darren clarified. "charlie did technically find it on his own, but he knew roughly where he should be looking... because of this." darren pointed to the report. "a field report written by member of the commission 32 years earlier."

"i thought you said that the palaeontologic commission was a secret," i challenged. "why would they have put out an official field report?"

_

"not report," darren corrected me. he pulled out the drawer this one had come from to show me it was full of similar documents. "but reports!"

_

"funny you should ask that, traumador," darren continued. "i wondered the same thing. at first it looked as though the geologic survey was trying to publish the findings of, but yet hide, the commission's scientific activities by claiming them as actions of some of sternberg's people (who were the canadian team in the rush)."

_

"wouldn't that ruin a cover up?" i wondered out loud. i would make the worst super spy ever people of the innerweb... i can hardly keep track of what's going on around me right now, that alone around other people. that alone try to picture what WILL happen to all these variables. yet even i knew publishing these field reports would catch someone's attention! as was clear by darren knowing about them...

_

"exactly," darren agreed with me. "in fact in 1918 there was a massive uproar within the geologic survey when these field reports were brought to the administrations’ attention."

_

darren pulled me out another larger photo. it looked like one of the men from the dig picture of my birth site, but i couldn't tell what he looked like. where his face should have been there was a hole.

_

"it turned out these reports had all be filed and published by this man. francis slate. a key agent of the commission, possibly THE key agent! by the time the survey found out what he'd been doing it was too late. too many copies of the reports had been printed and distributed. for them to get all of the copies back they'd have raised immediate attention to their contents. instead they just left them mixed in with the sternberg's reports where they went largely unnoticed for years," darren informed me.

"why would he want them published in the first place?" i asked. "won't that break his cover?"

"i don't know," darren confessed. "it's only one of the many things i'd like to know about this man!"

"if i had to guess, as the reports are only on scientifically important sites, i think he just wanted them to be known by other people," darren informed. "slate seldom ever collected things himself. on occasion he did alert the american and canadian teams to skeletons, but many of his sites were well outside their operating area! if he hadn't recorded these other sites they might have remained unknown forever."

_

"for example he records, though rather cryptically, at your site... the presence of eggshell!" darren pointed to the report. holly smokes! he was right!!! this predated the first official discovery of dinosaur eggs in canada, at devil's coulee, by well over three quarters of a century!

_

"did he get in a lot of trouble?" i hesitantly asked, thinking how much trouble i'd gotten into for when i screwed up. i figured messing up a big conspiracy would lead to way worse punishments.

_
"no," darren said matter of factly. before i could ask he added. "he'd been dead nearly a year before the survey discovered the reports."

_

"slate died at the end of the dinosaur rush. with the withdraw of all the fossil hunters, annex didn't have the same cover he'd enjoyed up till than, and the outbreak of world war one made it difficult to ship to europe anyways. the lord pulled out of canada. due to this the geologic survey shut down the commission. all a few months after slate died." darren said sadly, as though this francis slate was a friend of his.

_

"you okay?" i sympathized.

_

"yes," darren said putting on a fake smile. "i just think it's tragic that the exploits of this man have been deliberately forgotten. in fact his whole life has been wiped out. there are no records of him before 1912," darren pointed to the photo i held in my claws. "there isn't even a good photo of him. any closeups of him have had his face destroyed or distorted on purpose. i'm sure for security purposes back than, but now that just means he is spectre of history."

_

there was a sombre silence between us for a minute. "anyways about 6 years ago i made a real effort to try and find out as much about francis slate as i could. him, and this lord annex, are the biggest unknown players in alberta's palaeontology left. to do this i recruited as much help as i could get to try and find francis' field report sites," darren told me.

_

"among this help was a person and a dinosaur you know. craig and larry," he emphasised.

_

"craig had been helping me with my lost quarry project [post on this ubber soon promise!] for a while. so i gave him your site's field report to check out that week. as for larry i have no idea why he suddenly took interest in field work, but when he heard we were checking around huxley he insisted that he was coming to help. i needed all the help i could get, and i wasn't not arguing with a fully grown tyrannosaur," darren levelled with me. "so we all went our seperate ways in the morning, and by the end of the day next thing i knew craig came back to field camp with 9 field jacketed eggs, and you hatched and wrapped up in his hoodie."

if a tyrannosaur could cry i would have shed a tear there. fortunately for me we don't actually cry tears... though due to my hanging around humans i have picked up some of your emotional expressions, and i gave away my vulnerability by sniffling.

_

trying to change subjects to distract from my emotional moment i asked. "did you find out anything more about slate?"

"nope," darren said slightly resigned. "you and this drawer hold everything i was ever able to find out about francis slate. i gave up a few years ago, and am sticking with lost quarries that won't led to dead ends," with that he took back the papers from me, and put them back into the drawer which i than noticed he had double locking on.

_

well i had a few more answers about where i came from. at the same time i had some way bigger questions too. i was not feeling too chipper, as darren started to plug away at his puter.

_

i took this as my cue to leave. just as i was about to head out the door from behind me darren offered. "i have a free morning tomorrow," he had loaded a map onto the screen. "would you like to go see the site?" which i pointed to...

would i!?!?!

before you knew it i saying thank you over and over again, while shaking his hand so hard his voice came out funny when he asked me to stop.

it was set! tomorrow i'd have the master of finding lost dig sites take me to where i was dug up! though i knew in the small logic part of my head it won't answer all my questions, i still felt like tomorrow i'd finally know where i came from...

to be continued... where it ALL began!

(Production Note: Much of this post is fictional. References to Traumador's egg, the Palaeotolgic Commission, and Francis Slate are not real. Information on the Huxley Tyrannosaur IS factual though, and based on real events. The only fiction around this Tyrannosaur's history is Francis Slate's involvement with its discovery. In reality it WAS discovered by Charlie Sternberg in 1946 and dug up as described.)

brooding on my origins (origins part 1)

well i'm beginning to think that i'm not going to learn the identity of whoever bought me the plane ticket, for my 5th hatching day present, that has brought me back here to drumheller. whoever they are they've been going to great effort to lie low. so much so that no one else around here know about or even suspected i might show up.

now don't get me wrong, people of the web wide world, its been a fun trip home. however just some of the time. without anyone to specifically hangout with, its getting a little boring. as no one was expecting me to be here everyone is busy with work, and as the royal tyrrell museum is really busy i can't really tag along with anyone too long before i get in the way...

meaning i'm starting to get on everyone's nerves... that is till today when i made a fortuitous stop by the education department.

i popped up there on the hunt for anyone not currently working. i hit pay dirt, with my two former co-workers tony and yumi both on lunch break. one of the very rare times an educator at the museum gets to sit down and do nothing... even than their usually eating while preparing for the next program, tour, or hike of their day...

i was excited. this was going to mean i had someone to talk to/hang out with, if even for just a few minutes anyways. as cool a place as the museum is it can't really thrill or occupy you for days and days on end. so some social interaction was going to be a nice change for today.

at first it was a nice little chat about what tony and yumi had been up to throughout the day. a few dinosite tours (that's a guided tour to a real dinosaur bonebed), a excavate it (a simulated dig for the public), a couple fossil castings, and a kids day camp finishing off the afternoon. than suddenly the conversation turned to what i'd been doing...

that was a little awkward. i admitted to pretty much the same thing i'd been doing the last few days. bumming around the museum, and basically bugging anyone i found in the middle of a spare moment.

tony agreed. "yeah i'd been noticing that man," he observed, and than politely warned. "not that i personally mind, it's great seeing you around here again man, but some of the big wigs, well they're starting to get mad at you for reenacting the old days."

that wasn't good. i didn't want to strain my otherwise bad relations with the museum anymore. afterall making the people who fired you even madder wouldn't do me any favours. especially since the world museum community was a pretty small one...

than tony made a great suggestion. "what you need to do is find something that'll keep you out of trouble." he noted wisely. though a second later kinda undid the wise guy aura he'd built up. "though i'm not sure what?"

it was a great idea, but what could i do at the museum that i had never done before?... i mean i had lived here for two years afterall!

yumi made a suggestion that was a little obvious. "you could always use this as a chance to learn more about palaeontology," which i appreciated, but having gone through the galleries like a million times this week there wasn't much more i was going to learn in there.

just as i was about to politely ask her for a different idea, yumi put down one of the many books the ed department has and suggested. "you could start by looking up some stuff in one of these," she cheerfully advised. "even though i know lots, there's always more to learn, and i find at least one new fact in a book a day!"

well it sounded like a fine enough idea, and i saw no reason not to try it. however it wasn't going to keep me occupied all day, that alone for the next few weeks i was stuck in drum. with a brain as small as mine reading and learning can only go on so long before i get overwhelmed.

i worried that asking for another suggestion would hurt yumi's feelings, but i was going to have to ask for more... that was till i noticed the picture on the page yumi had just happened to open the book too. it was a picture of a dinosaur embryo in an egg.

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suddenly i had one of those light bulbs turning on inside my brain moments! yumi was totally right. just not in a general sense like she had been talking in.

i'd always wanted to know where i'd come from, and why i was here in this the human world. now was the perfect chance to find out. where else but here at one of the top palaeontologic institutions in the world could i find out why i'd fossilized!!!

yumi and tony both had to run off to their various programs shortly thereafter, but i hardly noticed. i'd leapt full on into the education library... well okay i didn't actually leap. that would have damaged the books and probably me come to think of it... reading everything and anything i could about dinosaur eggs and nests. trying to find any references to vivus-fossils or my own egg's discovery.

i didn't find anything about me specifically, but i did learn a lot that i hadn't known before. you hear about dinosaur eggs all the time. yet at the same time beyond the fact that dinosaurs laid them and we find them i didn't know anything about them.

with this new knowledge added to that i'd gather back during my first look into my origins at the devil's coulee fossil nesting site i was starting to get a picture of how dinosaur eggs fossilized and were preserved into the present.

however being that i was at a museum with world class researchers on staff, who better to ask than the dinosaur egg expert just down the hall?!?

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so i popped by the office of my old palaeontologist buddy dr. françois therrien, curator of dinosaur palaeoecology. his job is to look at anything and everything to do with how dinosaurs lived. whether that be their environment or them themselves.

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françois was very welcoming when i showed up at his door with no appointment. he shook my hand when i came into his office, and of course like everyone else here in canada, wanted to know what i'd been doing with myself when i left. as for françois, he'd been really busy being a scientists and publishing tons of stuff while i was away.

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with that out of the way i didn't want to waste his time and got to business. i wanted to know about dinosaur eggs. everything and anything he knew about them. which as luck would have it he knows a lot about. him and his research associate darla zelenitsky (who herself specializes on just dinosaur eggs... too bad she is based in calgary or i'd have double the experts!) have published a few papers on dinosaur eggs and nests in the last couple years.

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françois was more than happy to not only share his immense knowledge, but even showed me some cool as specimens. like this nest, that was just in the news. he thinks it might be a dromaeosaurid nest.

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man françois is the dude! totally dropping everything to help me out for an hour. without an appointment or anything! palaeontologists are the best...

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that and he knows his stuff! i found out there was so much we do, and at the same time don't know about dinosaur eggs!!!

so the easiest way to relay this is through a...

okay, so to start off with dinosaurs, like our relatives the reptiles (our ancestors) and the birds (our descendants), have babies by, well, getting eggnant. which results in the mommies laying eggs, and the babies having to figure out a way to get out of them. which as i recall was a bit of a workout to say the least!

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fossil eggs were actually discovered by science a lot earlier than most books tell you. for some reason the myth has developed that roy chapman andrews found the first dinosaur eggs in the 1920's, but this is NOT true. the first scientifically recognized dinosaur eggs were found in france in 1859, but as these were not as heavily publicized as those of andrews' they were overshadowed by the american museum of natural histories' heavy publicity of their find in the 20's.

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since 1859 dinosaur eggs have been found on every continent except anarctica (more just because it is too cold in the present for people to properly wander around looking for fossils). don't let this world-wide coverage fool you though. there is a LOT we still don't know and need to find out about how dinosaurs laid their young...

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one of the biggest gaps in our knowledge is who laid what. at moment we only have eggs from 1-2% of all known dinosaur types, and some of these eggs may be from types we haven't found proper fossils of either!

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it can be (note i said can, not always!) impossible to be certain which dinosaur laid which egg due to there being no relation between a fossil skeleton and an egg. this is the same problem with linking dinosaur footprints to their maker. though we can guess at what soft tissue covered the bone we can not be certain, and thus even with close match of foot bones to footprints it can not be a sure thing.

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unlike footprints though there is one sure way to link an egg to a family of dinosaur. that is finding an embryonic skeleton inside an egg (which is rare!). with the fossilized bones of a baby you can tell for sure whose egg it is, but this is the ONLY sure way to this.

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in the past when egg sites were found to have adult bones of a dinosaur with the nest it was thought to be evidence of whose eggs these were. a famous case of this was roy chapman's eggs. they were found with protoceratops nearby, and assumed to be theirs. so that when the proper parents were found close to a similar nest it was thought to be stealing these eggs. so poor oviraptor got its name of egg thief due to misreading the fossil evidence.

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most of the dinosaur eggs that have been found so far are from the end of the dinosaurs era in the later cretaceous. which seems odd. granted that's not to say no eggs have been found from the triassic or jurassic. there have been, but the majority are from the late cretaceous.

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there are a number of theories on why this might be. it seems no coincidence that all of the dinosaur eggs so far found all have hard calcium shells. many palaeontologists believe this might show many dinosaur eggs didn't fossilize because they were a softer "leathery" eggshell.

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environment changes going on in the late cretaceous may account for why more dinosaurs developed harder shells as time went on. at the same time there is no evidence to prove or disprove this, but it is an interesting suggestion.

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the fact we have fossil eggs at all is extraordinary in and of itself though. when you think about an egg it is really just a thin shell, even if that shell is made of hard stuff. the fossil record has always been one of mostly hard things. so the more breakable or fall aparty you are the less likely you are to fossilize.

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one of the other problems is that dinosaurs being land dwelling creatures, they tended to live in heavily vegetated places. well plants when they die and break down tend to make acid. though it is low enough to not usually effect bone (except in coal seams) egg shell being so thin would tend to dissolve if buried in such rocks.

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only in environments that lacked this acid build up like the desert of cretaceous mongolia, or like the snail and clam rich deposits of devil's coulee above (note the eggshell in the centre of the pic and the snail shell right above it). these shells created an extra source of calcium that would buffer the shells and keep them from dissolving in the acid.

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this also helps account for the rarity of dinosaur eggs. especially if not all of them were hard calcium but made of leathery shells instead!

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from those dinosaur eggs we have found several different types of nesting and parental care have come to light.

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immediately some dinosaurs clearly just dug a hole laid their eggs in it, and than left. leaving their babies to fend of themselves.

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others such as this nest above showed more effort in the construction of the nest, and evidence the parents tended to the eggs at least until they hatched.

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in this picture you can see how all the eggs have been arranged in a circular fashion which would have allowed a parent to sit on the top of the nest and keep them warm. something we call brooding in modern birds. in some dinosaurs care was placed into the laying arrangement, but due to the adults big size, vegetation was used to keep the eggs warm instead (otherwise the parent might crush their eggs!).

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there have been some recent debates about how to interpret and detect a nest versus a hole. this makes sense as we are not finding the nest as it was made millions of years ago, but rather its buried remains. as nests are often buried by soils and sediment similar or identical to that which they are made of, seeing the before and after can be difficult to impossible.

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there is a lot more specific detail i could try to tell you, but i don't get it all, and it's all about specific types of dinosaur eggs. since non of these are tyrannosaur eggs i'll finish here.

needless to say dinosaur eggs are an exciting and still wide open field of palaeontology!

now i have a lot more a base with which to try and figure out where and how my egg was preserved and than turned into a vivus-fossil i decided my next step talk to the one guy here at the museum who would know how my egg was found. than hopefully i'd have some answers!

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to be continued... in the tale of three discoveries!

5th hatching day...

[Production Note: Please just imagine we got this up a month ago on time. Thanks- Prehistoric Insanity Productions]

Wow a whole year gone, and another hatching day is here again... can you believe, people of the web wide world, i'm 5 years old!

five years to this day i was found by my discoverer, and soon legal guardian, craig... which brings up all sorts of emotional type stuff people of the innerweb.

just the story surrounding my actual discovery makes me feel all sorts of things. i only know bits and pieces of the tale, and it really raises more questions than answers any.

the only concrete fact i know is that craig was definitely out prospecting for fossils. okay and that he was searching around huxley alberta.

the rest is kinda dodgy on reliability. craig mentioned something on my last hatching day about being out looking for lost quarries (those are fossils digs for which no location was recorded. the location information is very important these days for palaeontology), but i'm not sure whose old dig or why. the most puzzling part of the tale i've got is from a photograph of craig's expedition in which craig and my JERK! of a cousin larry are in the badlands searching together (or at least based on the photo their out together!)???

than of course is the whole question of why my egg was there at all... okay obviously it fossilized, but i wonder why it wasn't a normal fossilized egg... how did it become a vivus-fossil (as professor paradigm calls us prehistoric critters who should be extinct but yet have popped up here in the present)?

other emotional things are stirred up too though, leaving me with plenty of guilt and shame. after letting larry talk me into being as big a JERK! as he is, i totally brushed off craig in the middle of his trying to help me resist the pack of the primordial feather. afterwards when i went to try and apologize for what i'd done i discovered craig had disappeared from new zealand entirely!... i have no clue where he went or how to contact him. i just really want to patch things up with my legal guardian. he is the only family i have.

fortunately i have a lot of friends on the innerweb, and in particular facebook who helped cheer me up, and distract me from all the mystery of my hatching day. among those nice enough to give me a nice shout out (or would that be type out?) were:

the most intelligent brain... er i mean brian from one of my favourite blogs Laelaps.

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my great virtual buddy glendon from The Flying Trilobite (i'm not as he is virtual whether he himself if a flying trilobite or not... so to be on the safe side i included this picture that could be of him and his family) wrote this nice little message.

Happy Hatching Day, Traumador! Eat lots and lots of meaty cake!

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from my special talent agent peter bond i got this:

"It's your party/you can hatch if you want to/hatch if you want to hatch if you want to..." but seriously, HAPPY Hatching DAY, Traum-baby!

You're one more year older and one more year wise....um, one more year making money!

K... Read More eep it up, Big Man, and we'll be swimming in the green stuff by your next hatching day!

Your Talent Agent,Peter Bond, ATA

i also got a message from someone i'd forgotten about, and haven't talked to in way too long (not that i really want to...) agent hamilton of the new zealand department of conservation.

Traumador, I see from your personal file that it is the anniversary of your hatching day today. I'm wishing you a happy birthday from the Department of Conservation.

I also have reason to believe you are not currently in ... Read More the country, and that you have not been in Dunedin at your job or abode for several weeks. Be aware that your status as an Extracontinental Organism requires that you inform the Department of Conservation immediately of any changes of address or movements around the country or abroad. I have had reports of sightings of a small dinosaur as far north as Whangarei. There have also been worrying reports of unusual lights and creatures in areas you have been seen. Please advise me immediately of your return date. I will need to see you in person to discuss these issues.

Yours sincerely,

Agent A. Hamilton Department of Conservation

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oh boy... i'd totally forgotten about contacting agent hamilton about my whole new zealand wide museum quest adventure... she was really annoyed last time i left my home in the botanic garden without informing her! that time i'd only moved a block down to avoid a week long flood. what about this time months and months out of dunedin, and now new zealand!!!

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i need to remember to phone her.

the weirdest thing though people of the web wide world...

i got a hatching day present!

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now don't get me wrong, i know that people get presents for their birthday all the time. i'm not a person though. typically the only person who would get me anything would be craig. again he's gone bye bye. furthermore no one knew i'd be going to australia for my hatching day (especially me!!!).

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yet it arrived for me at the hotel i'm staying at none the less. no name. just a card telling me to enjoy the present. no name or even return address on the envelope.

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my present. i can hardly believe it! a plane ticket.

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you're never going to believe for where to though people of the innerweb...

DRUMHELLER canada!!!!!!!!!!

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i haven't been back "home" in over almost two years now. to be honest it is definitely the most memorable thing anyone has ever gotten me.

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i can't help but worry though about it at the same time. who sent it to me? why? HOW?

at the same time it might be nice to go visit all my old friends back where i grew up. i have a ton of stories and adventures to tell them about!

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though the one person (well okay dinosaur) who i want to see more than any is here in melbourne now! more to the point i have a date with her tomorrow!!! so i'm not going to worry about this plane ticket till after my DATE WITH LILLIAN the ALBERTOSAUR!!!