Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
worked well, and by March 5 we were setting up our camp under the
dim, reddish light of dusk.
The twenty or so people who composed our crew included the usual
suspects. The team of paleontologists included Rodolfo and his staff
from the Carmen Funes Museum, our egg specialists Frankie Jackson
and Gerald Grellet-Tinner, and a number of technicians, students, and
volunteers from Argentina and various other countries. Several new
fossil hunters and geological specialists also joined us. The interna-
tional flavor of our expedition team continued to expand, with the
addition of a young Italian student, Giuliana Negro, whose warm tem-
perament and enthusiasm for dinosaurs gained her a handful of joy-
ful nicknames. Nick Frankfurt, our illustrator for this topic, came along
to get the kind of firsthand experience that all artists want when work-
ing on a project. He also assisted with some paleontologic activities.
The entire team benefited from the superb cuisine of our cook,
Omar Garces, whose diligence and cordiality made our camp a much
more pleasant place.
After we finished setting up camp on March 6, we resumed many
of the tasks we had intended to continue when we had left the year
before. Luis, Frankie, Gerald, and others returned to our quarry in egg
layer 3 and began removing the overlying rock on some one hundred
square feet of surface. We wanted to augment our map of eggs and to
explore the relationship between them and the slickensides we had
found the previous year. This season we were much better prepared for
large excavations because we had brought a portable air compressor
and pneumatic tools that enormously speeded the removal of the
three feet of sterile rock covering the egg layer. These tools also saved
us from painful evenings of recuperation after the backbreaking work.
Before completely exposing the egg layer, we decided to map on
our egg-distribution chart the numerous slickensides that crisscrossed
the quarry surface and intersected each other at varying angles. We
marked the slickensides with fluorescent spray paint to help us under-
stand both the origin of the slickensides and the distribution of the
eggs. Luis, Frankie, Matt Joeckle, and David Loope spearheaded this
operation. A reserved man with a cynical sense of humor and an
expert on fossil vertisols, Matt examined the mudstone containing
the eggs to help us understand the climatic conditions that had pre-
dominated at the time the dinosaurs nested. Once highlighted with
