Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
out, we would have to do some digging to remove the rock above
where we hoped that the skeleton was buried.
Rodolfo and his crew volunteered to excavate the new dinosaur
skeleton, and on March 4, they began by shoveling a foot or two of
mudstone off the area. Then, as they carefully picked through the
remaining mudstone with pocketknives and other small tools, more
tail vertebrae appeared. By the end of the day, all the rest of the tail
vertebrae had been exposed, along with the hipbones and some of
the large bones of one hind leg. To our relief and great joy, the bones
were all well preserved, and they fit up against one another in the
same positions they had occupied when the animal had died.
With the back half of the animal now exposed, Rodolfo and Luis
could see the shapes of the bones, providing some clues for identify-
ing it. The bones of the tail and hind leg were almost identical to
those found in
Carnotaurus,
one of the meat-eating theropods called
abelisaurs. We were all thrilled because remains of abelisaurs are
extremely rare, and many parts of their skeleton had never been
found before. Rodolfo was particularly ecstatic: as a specialist on
large predatory dinosaurs, he had been hunting for more than a
decade for a complete skeleton. It looked as if his quest might finally
be fulfilled.
At the quarry, work was also progressing nicely under the supervi-
sion of Frankie and Gerald. By the end of the day, sixty eggs had been
exposed and mapped. Frankie had divided the surface of the quarry
into one-meter squares and recorded the position of each egg in
three dimensions from one corner of the quarry. To our knowledge, no
other study had been able to document the distribution of so many
eggs, and we hoped that our good fortune might allow us to make
some important advances in understanding how sauropods had laid
their eggs. With work at both quarries yielding spectacular results, it
was time to celebrate: the sizzling of that evening's
asado
was accom-
panied by the popping of champagne bottles.
On the following day, Rodolfo and his team continued to probe
through the mudstone at the dinosaur quarry, and they found even
more bones from the skeleton. The arms were small in relation to the
rest of the body, although they were proportionally slightly larger
than the arms in
Carnotaurus.
Nonetheless, the shapes of the arm
bones were very similar. Some vertebrae from the neck were also
