another of my friends famous!

the royal tyrrell museum just put up on their youtube channel a video all about my friend tony!

it's all about a day in his life at the museum, though i don't think it really conveys his job well (having done a similar one myself for a time), but it does really bring tony across!

i think they should have done a video about an untypical day in his life... like this one or this one... in those cases he really was a superhero of sorts!

oh well. it is good to see the museum recognizing some of its top talent, and awesome to see tony doing what he does best (well at least sort of see it)...

[also i'm back... so comments will be immediately moderated and i can talk to people]

field journal #11

it was just tony and me searching today. due to our chilling find of a possibly illegal dig yesterday, yumi was back at the tyrrell making an offical report about the site.

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despite this set back, we pressed on in trying to find either the lost quarrys of francis slate, and/OR a significant fossil find (a partial, or for that matter complete skeleton, how about a skull... i'd take anything at this point!!!)

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after the weeks i'd been pouring into this project, and not finding anything, i was losing hope. how could i not. they say that for every 200 hours you put into the field you should make one great discovery (assuming you've been looking in suitable places... which given this is alberta i sure had been!). well i was nearly up to 200 hours when i started, and now i certainly had achieved that time investment. yet still found nothing!

fortunately for me, tony is ever the optimist (though it helps that he was only just brought into this a few days ago!), and had a feeling we were going to have a big day. somehow he convinced me of that, and so we both charged into today's hunting rather eagerly.

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based on the information darren tanke had given me about francis slate, most of his drumheller region hunting had been done around the coal mines that were everywhere around here during the great canadian dinosaur rush. we'd already searched 4 old mining sites; the atlas, nacmine, star, and midland.

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today we'd came to the once monarch mine. it was close to the midland, and directly across the river from nacmine. we thought this end of the valley was more likely a candidate for slate's interest, and even if not a good one for us making a modern find. this area was nothing but horseshoe canyon era rocks, and thus should be full of dinosaurs.

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we had only been looking around an hour or two when tony called to me in excitement...

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as i walked up, tony modestly said. "i think i've found something." now, this might sound like he was unsure, but you have to know tony to get what he was saying.

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translated from tony speak, what he actually said was "i just found the coolest thing we're going to see all day." however as he is such a nice and under spoken guy, he doesn't ever say it this way... just going out into the field with him a few times i've learned...

i started to get excited.

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this is why i'd wanted tony to help me out in the first place. he is a fossil magnet, which for whatever reason; better eyesight, or more patience, or he was just born with natural luck, means he tends to make huge finds where the rest of us might find the usual stuff.

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taking my own look, tony certainly had found "something". it was a bonebed. however these bones were different somehow... i couldn't put my claw on what about them though.

"check out this tooth," tony beckoned to me from a metre away.

it was an albertosaur tooth. a really nice albertosaur tooth.

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however i found my enthusiasm sinking. you find albertosaur teeth in bonebeds all the time, as my ancient relatives would come in to scavenge the free meals that were the animals about to become a bonebed. in the process they'd lose some teeth which you'd find mixed in with the bones.

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meaning this was becoming just another ordinary bonebed...

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however a moment after my hopes began to sink, tony corrected me on where i was looking. "no, not that one," and pointed at a tooth just a few centimetres away. "this one."

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it was another albertosaur tooth. only it was much bigger. plus it was shaped differently.

now having very similar teeth to these myself, i knew immediately what i was looking at!

this was a big deal. this was a huge deal!

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what tony had just found was an albertosaur tooth with its root still attached to it! not something you commonly find. in a bonebed or anywhere else!

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we dinosaurs, unlike you mammals, continually grew new teeth in all the time to replace broken or woren ones. meaning we were shedding them all the time. however when we shed them we didn't typically lose the root with it. normally we'd just reabsorb the root back into our jaws.

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meaning either something really terrible had happened to this albertosaur, and he'd lost tooth and root (it'd happened to me only ONCE {i've lost 103 teeth so far in my life} when i was younger and wanted to get some money from the tooth fairy. i tied a string to the back of craig's car and my tooth, and well... when the tooth and root followed the car and i didn't. NOT a nice feeling!). or the much much MUCH more likely scenario that (as something like my car scheme wasn't too common 70 million years ago!... if it'd happened back then it would have been a terrible illness or injury that'd knock the root loose with the tooth) this tooth and root had come out of the jaw soon after the albertosaur died...

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which with the two teeth so close together in front of me (with a canadian one dollar coin, a loonie, for scale in the photo) suddenly i realized what we were looking at... it explained why the bones had felt different from normal drumheller bonebeds. more importantly we'd made a huge find!

this wasn't an edmontosaur bonebed at all... it was an albertosaur one!

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though we couldn't tell at moment whether it was just one really torn apart albertosaur or a whole bunch of them, this was just the sort of find we'd been wanting to make.

i was so glad i'd brought tony along with me today!!!

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at the same time i couldn't help but feel kind of useless... afterall i'd been the one out here for days and days, and in the end i wasn't needed at all! which was kind of a bummer.

still don't hold that against tony. credit is due where credit is due, afterall...

it took a while for the overwhelming joy and excitement of realizing what he'd found to wear off... then we finished analysing what little we could from the exposed bones on the surface. there was going to have to be a formal dig to unearth anything conclusive from this site. coming to that conclusion we finally peeled ourselves up from the bonebed with the intent of looking around the area a bit more (two finds would certainly be better than one at the end of the day!).

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standing up, and lifting my eyes off the ground for the first time in minutes, i had a funny feeling. as i couldn't figure out why, i happily resumed talking to tony about our next direction of exploration... suddenly my tiny mind had a brain wave!

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i shot my head back up... leaving tony hanging on me mid sentence.

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i just stared ahead for a minute in silence.

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tony asked me worriedly. "what is it?"

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"we have to get back to the museum right now!" i said urgently, a million thoughts were going through my head.

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"why?" tony asked in disbelief.

my stomach had just turned to butterflies, and my head was rather light (my small brain was overwhelmed by the realization i'd just made). tony might be the fossil magnet, and his find was pretty cool... but i'd just pulled my weight for today! and then some...

if it hadn't been for tony, we wouldn't have found this spot. so he was important (where i had not been). however, had i not been here the overall significance of this spot would have been missed, making me now equally important. i point this out not to boost (well okay maybe a little!) but to say, that both of us being there today lead to hopefully the biggest discovery of the year in alberta! just one of us would have missed the whole picture...

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i'd tell you more right now people of the innerweb, but i have to get back to the tyrrell right now, and let them know what we just found!!!

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to be continued...

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Palaeo CHALLENGE... what did we just find???

field journal #9

so far the great canadian dinosaur rush era fossil hunter francis slate's lost quarrys had been elusive. i hoped recruiting my friends/former tyrrell coworkers tony and yumi would help me track these down, or at least help make a significant fossil discovery along the search.
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based on the evidence i had at hand, mr. slate had done a lot of his drumheller area work around the many coal mines operating here during the dinosaur rush. his clever strategy was to save time by investigating and following up the discoveries made by the miners in their daily encounters with the local geology. meaning slate had potentially thousands of fossil hunters at his disposal (as there were thousands of miners living here in that era... though realistically most wouldn't have been looking for fossils, but the few that did would have been huge time savers).

we'd already checked out the areas around 2 of the valley's coal mines, the atlas and midland, but with no luck. not that this was casting doubts on slate's site being out there! with over 20 more of them out there it was time for us to pick up the pace, if we were going to exhaust all avenues!

so today we popped by the area around nacmine (the north american coal mine). in modern times there is still a small community which still bears the name of the mine, but 70 years ago it would have way bigger, and right under one of the biggest mines in operation in the valley.

it was a funny day of fossil hunting though, and not what i'd expected...

i'd brought along tony, as typically he is something of a fossil magnet. on every trip i have gone on with him (including the one to DPP), tony always manages to find the best stuff.

its not that i'm a bad fossil hunter, but i have to look real hard to find cool stuff. tony is a natural though. my guess is he has keener sight and sees the differences in rocks much better than me.

however if not thinking of it as a physical difference (which i'm sure it must be), it can appear as though tony just randomly stumbles on great fossils by accident (which to be fair a few times des happen... he'll walk right past a good spot first. one that even i with less keen senses would probably have spotted).
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today though i didn't need tony apparently. of all the finds we made, mine were the most impressive. sadly they weren't anything too spectacular...

this dinosaur vertebrae was our first "cool" find of the day. due to its heavy encasing in iron stone, we couldn't ID it. however as this is the horseshoe canyon formation it is a super safe bet that this would turn out to be an edmontosaur if we were to collect and prep it. edmontosaurs are STUPID common around here! you'll find 10 (some say as many of 20) edmontos before you find something else!

when tony came to inspect it, he was of the same opinion as me. we'd found plenty of broken scraps of bone so far, and this was our only in-situ bone (fancy wording for found in its original burial place). that still didn't warrant us wasting anytime on it. especially given its being encased in iron stone, and lack of other bones in association with it. this wasn't the big find we were hoping for...

at the same time tony was impressed. not that either of us thought i was bad at fossil hunting. we're both just used to him outshining me in the field on caliber of material found (i'd find the same amount, but nothing as cool as his...). i'd out done him... for now...

my last find of today had me think maybe the tables had turned. maybe i'd suddenly became a fossil magnet like tony...

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i found a pretty patchy micro fossil site, with little of interest in it. except for this one fossil...

an intact hadrosaur tooth! (you guessed it, edmontosaur most likely! though there is a slight chance it could be from one of the other rarer hadrosaurs of the horseshoe canyon era).

with that conclusion, nacmine turned out to be a dead end.

which is sad. in addition to slate, there was a slim chance we could have come across another BIG lost quarry. that being the site of joseph burr tyrrell's first albertosaur. it was in this area that he recorded finding it. however that was well over a 100 years ago. erosion by now most likely had wiped out the surface layers he had been working on. coupled with his only taking the skull it wasn't a big dig (though if erosion hadn't destroyed the spot that meant the body could still be there!), and won't be easy to spot. so it isn't surprising we didn't find it.

at the same time a tyrannosaur can dream a little can't he?

field journal #8

francis slate may have gone to great lengths to hide his activities a 100 years ago, during the great canadian dinosaur rush, but the mystery surrounding him was about to be under threat. as it was no longer just me hunting for his lost quarrys...

i now had a "team"... well 2 other people, tony and yumi, but that could be considered a team after a fashion (just not a very big one)... both of whom were going to help me track down mr. slate and his past operations.

with more people in gathered to the cause, all we had to do now was go to a suitable location to apply ourselves. as i had reasonable evidence that a lot of mr. slate's exploits (in the drumheller region anyway) were based around some of the 20+ coal mines operating in the area at the time, we would need to focus our efforts around these former mine sites.

i'd already checked out the most obvious coal mine in the valley, the atlas historic site, but fortunately for us one more mine that was still easy to find...

midland provincal park.

this name might sound familiar, and if you read my blog a lot you'd be right. midland has come up before, as the tyrrell museum is situated in this park. however we weren't going to be looking around the museum as (i already had, and) it marked the outer west boundary of the park, and wasn't what the park was established for originally.

midland provincal park had been setup in the beginning to perserve the site and artifacts of the old midland coal mine.

we wanted look around this old mine, so we needed to search the park's interior (as opposed to the fringe of the mine's propery that is around the tyrrell).

within minutes of wandering the park we encountered plenty of evidence of the once bustling mining activity. there were 4 old mining carts in our first search area, this one here being the most intact of the lot.

it was cool to think that this had once been used to bring loads of coal out of the hills around us, and back out to the surface for the first time in 72 million years!

it became pretty clear why they'd been mining this area. though there were many excellent fossil bearing layers of sandstone and mudstone, there were 3 thick huge coal seams running between the fossil layers!

then as i walked around a bend my heart nearly stopped. on the hill in front of me was a bunch of junk!

why was i so excited by old timbers and random debris? because one man's garbage can be a tyrannosaur's treasure...

was this evidence of an old slate quarry?!?

turning around to excitedly call over tony and yumi, i realized the few scraps i saw on the hillside were just the tip of the... uh coal-berg. scattered all around me were yet more remenants and left overs of the coal mine's operations... definately not stuff left behind by francis slate.

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i saddened a little bit. it made sense that a coal mine which operated for over two decades, and whose purpose was to tear apart the landscape around me, would leave a lot more evidence of its existence than a single palaeontologist passing through here for a couple days...

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this presented me with a new problem (and no doubt one of the reasons slate had remained elusive for all these years). if i was going to find slate around these mines, i couldn't count on over half the means that darren tanke uses to find lost quarrys. (which is probably why he seldom bothers looking for lost quarrys around drumheller. the mines cause a lot of artifact pollution!)
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fortunately i wasn't looking for unknown mystery quarrys. i had photographs of slate working this area. meaning i had one sure fire way of pin pointing where he was working. i'd have to find the actually spot of the dig sites and make sure i was watching the landscape around me carefully to not miss them!

midland ended up a bust, but not to worry. tony already had another site in mind for tomorrow...

the recruitment slate

i'd hit a dead end in my hunt for francis slate's lost quarrys. i had reason to believe slate did a lot of his field work around the coal mines of the valley during the great canadian dinosaur rush.

this coal mine idea would have been a great strategy... the coal miners worked around rocks for a living, and would no doubt notice stuff in their daily exploits around the badlands. using the miners would have saved slate huge amounts of time and effort... sadly a strategy that no longer exists. as all the mines went bust a LONG time ago... otherwise i might try to recruit a few onto my team today...

with no miners around to help me anymore, if i was going to pick up slate's trail i needed to track down more of the old mine sites. sadly, i'd already checked out the only really obvious coal mine in the valley. there were two more historic sites based around former coal mines... yet these were only 3 of over twenty such mines that had operated in the valley throughout the years. in other words i only knew a tiny patch of potential localities!

added to that my minor field... uh accident (stupid cactus!), the other day i was going to need someone else to help me in the field. that way i'd have someone to help me out if i ran into any real trouble.

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since they were going to be coming along, i needed to pick someone who could help me while i was at it. afterall not everyone would be able up to my fast hunting pace (as i didn't have forever to look), i was going to need someone with some prospecting experience. fortunately for me i knew a few experts...

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including my old friend tony.

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who i took the liberty of inviting to lunch today. i figured buying him lunch would help me recruit him into my expedition (buying the lunch not being an easy feat these days as i'm funding a world tour on the side of my regular exploits).

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why was i going to such lengths to get tony, you might ask? sure you might not have heard of him (outside my blog), but don't let that fool you. despite his lack of a PHD (like me), published papers (sounds like me), or any fossils being named after him (once again identical to myself) tony is a fossil hunting power house.

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what do i mean by power house? well i'm not too bad at fossil hunting. i've had years of practise, and it was worth it. tony also has similar experience and skills, but unlike me he is lucky. by that i mean he is literally gifted with luck!

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there are those among palaeontology who have this fossil magnet gene. it is an incredible ability to in most cases "stumble" onto amazing fossils almost by accident. in other words, they are, on the surface, identical to you and me in their prospecting abilities, but unlike us fossils almost leap out of the ground at them wanting to be found. the rest of us have to work REALLY hard to find them!

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after my weeks in the field, it was clear i lacked that gene. however i'd seen tony use it many times in the past (yes i'm jealous, but at least i'm honest about it!), so it was time for him to remind me of its power!

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i don't think i needed to buy tony the free lunch to interest him in my search (not that it didn't help mind you!). as i first mentioned what i was doing i could see tony's eyes flare up with exploration lust.

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however yumi was another story... oh yeah, i invited yumi too! she was there in the staff room with tony, and since she is a good friend from the olden days, it would have been rude not to bring her along too. besides three sets of eyes are better than two... that was, if the free lunch would persuade her to give up a day or two to help me out.

of course the lure of fossil treasure, and possible fame (in the science world anyway) were too much for a palaeo nut such as her to resist too! plus she liked lunch :P

my day off the hunt had paid off, big time! i'd now tripled my field team, and it only cost me two lunches!

better yet i'd acquired not only one very experienced fossil hunter (yumi) of the same skill level to myself, but i'd recruited a fossil magnet who also matched us for skill. meaning if i wasn't going to find slate now, no one else was ever going to!

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!

_

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

buried treasure!!! (DPP part 3)

who knew that being a palaeontologist was so much work?!?

i mean we all hear about the fame, fortune, and or course girls... can you believe the ladies actually give palaeontologists full access to their, ummm, anatomy... lucky smucks is all i have to say!


at least they have to work for it, i discovered today. arriving at the micro fossil site dr. brinkman got right to work with the excavating (that's a pro term for digging f.y.i.)


it was worth it though. we knocked loose tons of solid chunks of matrix (no not keanu! that's what sciency people call the rock around fossils of both the micro and uh non-mirco kind) within were the little prehistoric treasures we were looking for!


but it's such hardwork that after only two minutes dr. brinkman got so tired that he let me do the digging! he said that there was no way he could continue so while i dug him and tony sat by supervising me... though i didn't know that sitting under an umberlla and drinking iced tea was supervising, but that's what dr. b said, and he's the expert!

totally cool opportunity! (DPP part 1)

hello people of the web wide world

me once again... today was the most amazing day ever...

so there i was just sitting in the garden when suddenly my buddy tony came up and was like "hey traum what are you doing today?" and i was like "nothing"... cause remember since the end of summer my job doesn't exist anymore...

tony then asked me to come with him... turns out that he and THE dr. donald brinkman (curator of vertabrate palaeontology at the royal tyrrell museum!!!) were going to dinosaur provincal park (in my hubble little dinosaur opinion the best place in the world!) to dig for micro fossils.

micro fossils are just like normal fossils, the trace remains of ancient living dead things, just a tiny bit smaller...

anyways they needed more ppl to come on their dig, and since everyone else said no they came to me... isn't that really nice!!!

so here i am at dpp (that's the fancy short way to say dinosaur provincial park.... hehehehe look at me talking all like a sciency guy) ready to set off on a palaeontologic adenventure with tony

and dr. brinkman!!!

let you know how the dig goes first we have to check into the field station... keep you posted