After finishing Life's Splendid Drama last night, I immediately picked up Don Lessem's Dinosaurs Rediscovered which had arrived earlier in the day. It's like a little time capsule representing the state of paleontology when I was a kid, people like Paul Sereno, Michael Benton, and Peter Dodson being the young up-and-coming crop of researchers in the field (with plenty of attention paid to folks like Phil Currie, Bob Bakker, and Jack Horner, too).
I'm about halfway through it, but reading about the exploits of so many researchers in the field has sadly reminded me of my own lack of field experience. I have learned a lot from books, but they are a poor substitute for actual work with fossils. A few years ago, however, I did have the chance to get my hands dirty at the Inversand marl pit as part of a paleontology class. As I carefully scraped away at the blue-green marl from the end of the Cretaceous, picking out fossils of bivalves and snails that once lived at the bottom of the ocean, I uncovered a few scraps of bone. My pulse quickened as I saw the spongy brown structures underneath the solid tan surface, and even though all I found were a few little fragments it was a very exciting moment for me.
I know there are people here who have much better stories from the field, though, so please feel free to share in the comments.
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I am not a paleontologist by any stretch, but I have been lucky enough to get out in the field with Dr. Bakker several times, and it's always an amazing experience to see these astonishingly ancient fossils revealed.
My favorite experience was probably from the very beginning of the HMNS digs in the Permian beds in Seymour - it's a famous locality that's been dug on and off for about a hundred years - so when we arrived the ground was literally glittering with thousands of fragments that have weathered out. You couldn't move without stepping on something - which made for a very slow start! But the sheer volume of material at the surface really drove home how much there still is to discover there.
The team has been digging there for three years now, and they're still going out there to bring more of what the find back to the museum - and we're looking forward to seeing it on display one day.
I was in a field palaeontology class taught by Erle Kauffman at Colorado in 1981 and we were near Kremmling helping find Placenticeras ammonites. We had to break them out of big limestone concretions with a sledgehammer and pry bar. I found more of them than the rest of the class combined.
I was also lucky enough to travel into the field with Dr. Bakker during the summer of 2008. We went up to Montana and I got to see the site where the famous mummified dinosaur Leondardo was found.
While up in Montana, we had a little time to do a little dinosaur prospecting, and I am now the proud discovered of a brachylophosaurus. I was even able to name the dig site. Unfortunately the weather made it impossible to remove the specimen at that time, but I look forward to returning to Montana and working further on Marco.
Rappelling off the back of a jeep to collect in situ soil carbonates from a ~30M neogene section in the Meade basin a few years back is among my more memorable field experiences.
For those who haven't had the opportunity to do field work, it's worth noting that often, paleo field work is like fishing: hours or days of stultifying monotony punctuated with pulses of adrenaline when you find something which then usually turns out to be incomplete, poorly preserved or just unimportant. Of course as Erin notes some sites are a bit more rewarding!
One summer when I was a teenager we took a family vacation in our VW camper. My Dad, a geologist, planned a stop outside Wall, SD where the Pierre shale is exposed along I-90. We had a great time finding small bits of nacreous shell in pastel colors. Pretty, but all in small fragments, no intact specimens. Then I found a peculiar thing. I thought it looked like an inside-out snail. It was almost as big as my head! Far too big to carry home, so I set it back on the mound I had found it on. Then I looked at the mound. And I looked at the thing. The mound, about the size of a semi-truck tire, was an ammonite. The peculiar thing was the inner whorls of the shell. It was huge! That moment of recognition, when I finally made sense out of what I was seeing, is my favorite fossil moment. But every time I have found a fossil, from clams to palm leaves, it's a special thrill.