>>MARK NORELL: When people go out, say they
want to look for dinosaurs, everybody always
ask this, where do you want to dig?
So, this year we’re excavating in the south
end of the Big Horn Basin,
in the Morrison Formation, looking at dinosaurs.
The Morrison Formation is one of the most
iconic formations within paleontology, because
it’s the place where the first great dinosaur
discoveries were made in North America.
It has brontosaurus. It has stegosaurus. It
has the dinosaur species that everybody on
the planet has heard of.
This expedition is the 2018 installment of
the American Museum Niarchos project.
So, this is a joint project that’s run between
the American Museum and the University of
Lisbon, and my colleague, Octávio Mateus.
>>OCTÁVIO MATEUS: We have to imagine 150
million years ago this as a big plain with
some vegetation, a few forests, very large
rivers, and the entire ecosystem preserved.
And it gives a good glimpse, a good photograph
of the life during the late Jurassic.
One of the goals of having this expedition
is also having a training ground for our students
in paleontology.
We run the Masters in Paleontology in Portugal
and we invite the students
to come here to dig.
Let's keep this one protected with film.
>>NORELL: The basic way that we extract fossils
from the ground is just like, you know, Barnum
Brown did when he was tearing around here
and stuff in the 1890s.
>>MATEUS: We are still using the same techniques
that Barnum Brown and others have done.
So, we still use the hammer and chisel and
brushes. It’s always a destructive process.
>>NORELL: A typical day in the field is all
weather-dependent, but you get up, go out
there, and you just sit there and pound rocks all day.
[LAUGHS]
>>NORELL: We can’t use dynamite anymore,
which I wish we could.
Hey, Octávio, I think this might be a bone. Like a surface. This rounded thing here.
>>MATEUS: Yeah, looks like it.
>>NORELL: So, if it is, this could be like a therapod metatarsal.
If you make an assessment to excavate, then
you just start digging.
And you start pretty far away and you go closer
and closer and closer and closer,
until it feels safe.
Then you do the jacketing process, which is
just like covering it with toilet paper and
burlap infused with plaster of Paris and then
let that dry.
Crack it on the bottom.
Have that dangerous moment of flipping it
over when you hope that the whole thing isn’t
going to fall on the top of it, which has
happened.
And then plaster the bottom of it.
The Morrison Formation isn’t just dinosaurs.
There’s a tremendous number of other fossils
which have been found there.
When the early dinosaurs came out during the
big dinosaur rush in the late 19th century,
they dismissed a lot of the smaller animals,
because they were looking for big animals
to fill their dinosaur halls.
And that’s one of the reasons that we started
this excavation, is to try to fill in the picture,
by looking at the stuff that was ignored by
all the earlier collections.
It gives us one of the best pictures of the
origin of a lot of the major animal groups—be
they frogs, be they lungfish, be they…
>>MATEUS: …a turtle, perhaps.
A pterosaur.
So, all those animals which are more obscure,
harder to find, hard to preserve and that
will tell us a lot about the environment around
here.
>>NORELL: Well, this year we have two sites
that are about 5 kilometers apart.
But they're quite different, in some senses.
In one place, the material that we excavate in
is very sandy and soft.
The other place is more what we call “indurated,”
meaning that it’s harder and we have to
use more jackhammers and that kind of thing.
We’re still early in this whole project
here, because we’ve been at it for three years now.
But we’re just going to excavate and excavate
and excavate.
>>MATEUS: Because there are so many bones.
We’re talking about many skeletons in the
same position, in the same layer.
It’s definitely a lot of fun.
But scientifically, it’s much harder.
If we have one single skeleton, you know exactly
every bone belongs to that animal.
If you have many skeletons together—is that
femur, for instance, from animal to the right
or the animal to the left?
We don’t know.
>>ALEXANDRA FERNANDES: There's a vertebrae here.
>>CARL MEHLING: Well, if this is the only
thing in the way, maybe I can go that way, eventually.
[CHISELS CHIPPING AWAY AT ROCK]
>>NORELL: Collecting one bone can just take
a lot of time.
So, you have to have large crews and you have
to be able to come back to the places year
after year, year after year.
>>MATEUS: Every time since the first day,
every time we see this site, one gets overwhelmed.
Overwhelmed with the landscape, with the geology
of the region, but also with the amount and
the quality and diversity of bones we find
in the site.
In the first week we got here, we found four
skulls.
And that’s normally, that’s more than
one has in their entire life.
>>NORELL: Well, the thing about being a paleontologist
is that you never know what you’re going
to find when you go out to the desert.
