well these bone beds are so interesting
we've mostly focused on the invertebrate
animals that lived millions of years ago
and we examine their remains in the form
of the shelves but in this particular
bed we actually find evidence of ancient
whales so there's bones and here's an
outline of a bone here as part of a
vertebrae of a backbone and the darker
grains that you see that are scattered
throughout this particular bed include
fragments a bone that have been eroded
and rounded and so now they make up you
know large grains of rounded bone that
are in this bed so what that tells us is
that there were lots of things that were
living in the ocean you know at the same
time all the clams were living and other
invertebrates
there were marine mammals that were
living in the ocean and also reflect
what the conditions were in the Seaway
at that time so again the information
that we find in beds like this that we
can distinguish by the bone material and
some of these darker grains are very
helpful in learning about other kinds of
animals that lived way back millions of
years ago
