Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
This was exciting news: our quest to find adult skeletons inter-
mingled with the eggs had finally proved successful. These titanosaur
skeletons were less than ten feet away from nests, and the one found
by Andrea showed evidence of being scavenged. Its bones had been
broken by the sharp teeth of predatory dinosaurs, which were mixed
in with them. It seems likely that the carcass of this titanosaur had
remained exposed on the surface of the ancient floodplain while
hundreds of females were laying their eggs. Whether this animal
and the other sauropods we found in the egg layers were part of the
nesting community of Auca Mahuevo is unknown. But that they all
belong to the group of sauropods known as titanosaurs, the most
abundant dinosaurs of the late Cretaceous in Patagonia, lends some
weight to the suggestion that the eggs were laid by titanosaurs, too.
In the midst of these days of giddy discoveries, disaster nearly
struck in the form of a massive electrical storm. At the quarry, a
lightning bolt struck dangerously close to our team. Some of the crew
members were "blown" from their places by a thunderous bolt, and
others suffered minor burns when sparks traveled through their eye-
glasses and metallic pieces of their garments. This warning, needless
to say, sent them scurrying to camp before the rest of our paleonto-
logical troop. Luis and others, including the geologic team, were
working on the eggs and sauropods in egg layer 4, several miles farther
from camp. Bv the time the rain forced Luis's group to head back, the
road had reverted to a slippery path through the ancient Cretaceous
floodplain, which we unsuccessfully tried to negotiate for an hour. Any
hope of reaching camp vanished quickly when we confronted a pow-
erful flash flood that had completely obliterated the road. Accumu-
lating the drainage from a vast portion of the foothills of the Auca
Mahuida, this newborn torrent sliced through our road with four-foot-
tall waves of brownish water and cascaded at high velocity into a deep
creek on the other side of the road. We waited out the flood for a few
hours, and when we saw the first signs that the river was lowering, we
left the trucks behind and crossed it on foot. Several miles later,
after fording an even wider river that ran closer to camp, we reached
the safety of our tents. We were all exhausted and eager to rest,
which we did for the entire next day.
On March 14, several of us went to examine a curious egg clutch
that Alberto Garrido had spotted a couple of days earlier. Alberto
