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monstrous meat-eater Giganotosaurus, which was spectacular. This
new exhibit, along with a quick shower at a local motel, worked won-
ders to refresh our strength and enthusiasm, so we headed back to
camp with renewed vigor.
The trip turned out to be both long and a bit harrowing. Night had
fallen and the headlights on one of our older vehicles, which Lowell
was driving, began to fail. It became impossible to see more than a
few car lengths in front of us, and the headlights of oncoming cars
were completely blinding. We stopped to get the vehicle checked out
and bought a new battery at the last gas station before we left the
paved road for the long stretch of dirt roads leading into the desert,
but the problems soon reappeared. Lowell and Sergio Saldivia had to
drive the last seventy miles to camp slowly in order to see the dirt
roads at all, so we didn't get back until about 2:00 A.M. Ironically, it
turned out to be fortunate that the rain continued throughout that
night and all the next day, because we had a chance to sleep in, do
some laundry, take a lazy afternoon nap, and catch up on writing our
field notes. By about noon on March 8, the rains finally ceased, and
we were once again eager to go.
The rains had caused some minor damage in the quarries, but for-
tunately, the fossils were not affected. The pits were quickly drained
so that work could continue. At the egg quarry, Luis, Frankie, Gerald,
and the rest of the team focused on removing some of the rain-
softened overburden so that the excavation could be expanded to the
full thirty-feet-by-fifteen-feet that we had originally planned to map.
In the abelisaur quarry, Rodolfo's crew continued to expose more of
the skeleton.
Lowell, Julia, and Alberto, having finally finished measuring the
rocky layers and collecting magnetic samples at the site, turned their
attention to figuring out how many egg layers actually existed. Clearly,
at least two separate layers were present: one contained most of the
eggs on the flats and in the quarry, whereas the other lay about sev-
enty-five feet higher in the sequence. But were there still others, as yet
unrecognized? A closer examination of the eggs weathering out on the
flats revealed that two separate layers of mudstone, separated by
about five or six feet of unfossiliferous sandstone and mudstone,
actually contained eggs. In addition, another isolated cluster of eggs
was discovered about twenty-five feet below the layer that contained
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