Wedding Day And Dinosaur Boot Camp

My cousin is getting married today, a very happy day. I'm looking forward to sharing in the celebration.

Which brings to my mind the famous adage, "If you love something, set it free for a week in the rural badlands of southeastern Montana digging for fossils in heat in excess of 100 degrees avoiding scorpions and cougars. If it comes back to you and does not try to kill you, its yours." Which brings us to our Montana dinosaur chain gang vacation.

My cousin is younger than me by quite a bit, and got to know him better playing ice hockey for a while with him.

When I was in kindergarten and in 1st grade, I was very obsessed with dinosaurs, but lost interest when I couldn't find any more books on them in my little town. I mean, back then I wanted to be a paleontologist, and even my 1st grade teacher didn't know what one was. At one point they had me give a lecture to a 5th or 6th grade class on dinosaurs and to my recollection, did not get beat up. My cousin was also into dinosaurs, and his interest in them continues to this day. He is an artistically gifted person, who got involved for a while with some people who opened a dinosaur store/exhibit in a nearby shopping mall. He can really sketch dinosaurs.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, we were on our way to a game, when he mentioned to me that there were organizations or sites where you could travel and search for fossils, and possibly bring something back with you. He said that he was thinking about looking into such a trip and asked whether I might be interested in this. I stupidly responded, "yeah, sure, sounds interesting". Well, as it turned out to my later dismay, my cousin actually follows through with things. Subsequently I find out that he found a museum that organizes fossil digs and takes volunteers to assist them. He, his girlfriend and his Dad were in--how about me? I was a bit surprised but I somehow felt that I had already opted in from that prior conversation on the way to hockey, and I guess it was partial validation of my youthful obsession with paleontology. So I took a big leap of faith, only knowing that I knew nothing about what I was getting into.

The museum was the Burpee Museum, in Rockford Illinois, and the dig was going to be in the Hells Creek area of Montana. I had never been to Montana before and I assumed that it was going to be like Glacier National Park. This trip was to very rural Montana, very near to the Dakota's, very much Badlands. I had no idea that an area so close to Canada could be so ridiculously hot. But the first day the temperature hit 113 degrees, and a few people were overcome by heat. I was okay, considering we were outside for quite a few hours. I knew I was a complete ignoramus as to what we were doing, but at the very outset I was determined that I would carry my weight and work hard. I also hoped I would learn stuff too. Unfortunately shortly before we left I re dislocated my shoulder playing hockey and was a little concerned with my ability to
be productive. In fact the first day I spent a lot of time on my belly in an awkward position and at one point I felt the bone start to slide out of the socket. Fortunately nothing terrible happened and that was the only time I had a shoulder problem on the trip.

Anyway, about digging. Basically we were in the badlands in a very remote area, Ekalaka. I think the population of the whole county was about 1200 people with a very nice local museum in the capital. To contrast, the county I live in has about a million people. When we drove to the campsite where we stayed from Billings, something happened that we didn't understand. We were driving after having  a nice steak dinner in Baker, and as we turned to head east, a car or truck passed by and they waved to us!! My cousin's dad was driving and he almost slammed on the brakes, being a New Yorker like the rest of us. He was like, "that guy waved at us, what's he trying to do, do I know him?"  We had no ready explanation. Later we found out that there are so few people in this part of the U.S. that everybody waves to everybody. And I got a kick out doing it--If I tried that where I live my car would probably be one big dent or I would have carpal tunnel syndrome.  Starting out I guess there was a bit of trepidation about us from the Burpee group. New Yorkers!!! They'd probably heard things. Most of the people were from the Rockford/Chicago area, plus two volunteers from Seattle. I don't understand these stereotypes about New Yorkers. Though I guess it was a good idea that at the last minute we decided not to bring our switchblades. But overall very nice people who support science. By the end they were trying to get us to move to Rockford.

My Cousins Bachelor Party
Check out garters on T-Rex!

Anyway, I think this is how this excavating process works. There are rolling hills in this area, in many cases, on cattle ranches sometime owned by ranchers, in other cases federal or state lands leased by ranchers. The museum obtained permission to search for fossil remains on some of these lands. Not states lands, as there is a state repository for fossils, which I will elaborate a little on later. Fossil remains for the area are about 65 million years old at the end of the dinosaur era. So there are T-Rexs, Triceratops, duckbills, sharks. In earlier times this part of Montana was submerged. The question isn't that were animals here at the time as opposed to other parts of the country or world, it is that conditions here were conducive to the preservation of the animals. In some cases animals were killed and quickly covered over with mud or sand, say in a flash flood of a river. In this area fossils were better preserved than in other areas, being in many cases surrounded by what after many years became sandstone. Geographic strata in these hills are set up in a sort of geographic time line, so in certain levels are where you would find the fossils. And every time you have a storm the hillsides erode, revealing fossil remains. So we spent time stomping around the sides of these hills looking for new evidence of fossil remains protruding from the side of hills, or pieces of bone lying below where the rest of the fossil is.

And believe me it is not easy. Being a complete novice, so often I thought I found something, which ultimately turned out to be a rock or some other type of detritus, the paleontological equivalent of fool's gold. Scott and Katie, the people in our subgroup who were with the museum, were quite patient with me, even though they had their own aspirations that they were trying to fulfill.  They drove us far out on dirt roads into cattle ranches, blasting 80's pop music from the truck stereo. My cousin, who is way way ahead of me on the learning curve in this, actually stumbled on what he thought was a big piece of petrified wood, and he went up to Scott, and asked "Scott, do I have wood?" After a quick double take, he quickly eyed the specimen and said "take me to where you got this"!! Turns out it was not wood, but part of a Tyrannosaurus foot that had washed down the side of a hill. Unfortunately we could not locate where it came from, though we did look for some time.

We also spent a lot of time working at a site that had been discovered on a prior trip. And unfortunately in the interim period some of the bones had been poached. Dinosaur bones are worth a lot of money so I suppose their is a lot of incentive to steal. The people from Burpee were understandably very upset. But we helped dig around the skeleton and remove what bones were there. Smaller pieces are sort of shellaced while the bigger pieces might have to be plastered so that they can be moved without damage. Unfortunately, in most cases, finding a complete skeleton is a real rarity, probably due to the unusual  and often violent circumstances in which fossils are preserved. One of the tough things for me on this trip, beside the heat and hard work, resulted from the wind and dust. It was a very dry place. At some point I got something in my eye, probably a rock or some sharp dirt, though it felt like a shard from a beer bottle was lodged in there. I tried using eye drops, but it just wouldn't come out!!! Finally one night after digging Scott was giving a lecture on the T-Rex, andevery time I rolled my eyes to the right to watch him I was wincing in pain, and I had to turn my head to look at something rather than move my eyeballs. It felt like my eye was closing up. I went to the community bathroom/shower facilities and looked in the mirror and saw a big puddle of blood in the bottom rim of my eye.

That night I spent most of the night trying to get whatever was in my eye out. I knew that if I didn't I would need medical attention, which I was hoping to avoid. Or else I was going to make a pearl the size of a golf ball, like a giant sweaty Oyster. We were staying in basically camp bunkhouses, with no air conditioners and bunk beds. It was so, so hot. We were told to keep our boots of the ground, to keep scorpion from crawling inside to get heat at night. There were also supposed to be bears, cougars, etc. My cousins dad freaked when he heard about the cougars. Anywhere we went that topic was coming up. I saw cattle, pronghorn antelope and my first dead badger in leg extended rigor mortis. It was really amazing seeing the herds of pronghorn antelope, very beautiful and super fast animals. Anyway, happily I was able to remove the thing in my eye and the spent the rest of the trip in relative good health. In fact it was a great workout--I must have lost ten pounds from all the hard effort..

Toward the end of the trip, there was word that we were going to be visited by a famous person, who had heard that the museum had found some interesting things at Hell Creek. It was Jack Horner, who apparently is a famous paleontologist from Montana, who also happened to be a scientific consultant on the Jurassic Park movies. He also is in charge of the Montana State Depository for fossils at the Museum of the Rockies. He eventually showed up at our site via helicopter. I had a brief touched my greatness moment. He posed with us in a group picture at one of our digging sites. After the shoot he took a look at me, looked to the excavation , then turned back to me and delivered this pearl of wisdom--"Sandstone.... good for diggin'".

All in all a lot of hardship, but a lot of rewards. I did learn a little. One day they took us to a fossil area where we got to find and keep invertebrate fossils. We were not allowed to bring back anything with a backbone. I drank copious amounts of hot and lukewarm water. Worked like a dog, ate a lot of high-carb food to keep me going. My cousin's dad was a real trouper, going out there and doing his share. I give him a lot of credit for signing on to this. And his girlfriend, soon to be wife? What can you say--this was as far from Cancun or the French Riviera you can get!! At the end of the trip, I asked her if she was also into dinosaurs. She said "not so much". I said, "If your boyfriend is an 11 on a scale of one to ten, where would you be?" She said, "3". I told my cousin, you have a great great girlfriend!!! Imagine having a relationship with someone who would have your back on this!! Believe me, this was not your typical vacation. Not for the squeamish. I came back more tired than when I left.But I hope someday to do it again. Probably the heat, dehydration, and compensation for my lack of knowledge set to a soundtrack of 80's pop music made me a little too rambunctious for the task at hand. But have actually tried to learn a little bit about the field in the interim. We'll see what happens. Maybe after this wedding we will all be reunited in Utah, or maybe Mongolia. Though I am betting my cousin won't be honeymooning in either of those places.