Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
eggs. But that could serve as the focus for tomorrow's work; tonight
we would celebrate our success with some fine Argentine wine, a tasty
asado
featuring beef and goat, and a lively dance party.
We resumed our search for embryos the next morning, but with a
slightly different strategy. Up to this point, we had been concentrat-
ing primarily on the eggs exposed on the flats adjacent to the ridges
in the badlands, but now we decided to expand our search to the bad-
land ridges and ravines themselves. About a half mile from the flats,
a couple of Rodolfo's crew members, Pablo Puerto and Sergio Sal-
divia, found a hillside, below a ridge, littered with eggshell frag-
ments. Pablo is the chief preparator at the Egidio Feruglio Museum
in the province of Chubut. His vivacious personality and quick sense
of humor greatly enlivened the atmosphere of our camp, and his skills
as a collector proved essential in helping us identify the victims of the
ancient catastrophe at Auca Mahuevo. Sergio Saldivia is Rodolfo's
chief preparator at the Carmen Funes Museum. Quiet by nature, his
talent as an
asador
brought great satisfaction to our hungry field
crew, and his skill as a preparator proved essential in cleaning the eggs
and bones of the dinosaurs so that we could study and identify them.
Quarrying in under the surface of the reddish brown mudstone,
Pablo and Sergio discovered several complete, well-preserved eggs.
When they began to probe into one of the eggs, some small, thin,
brown bones appeared. Our quest to find an embryo had finally been
successful. The bones, rather large for embryonic bone at about three
to four inches long, appeared to fit up against one another, and their
shape suggested that they formed the leg of a baby dinosaur. Although
we could not unequivocally identify them in the field, we were pretty
sure we would be able to say which dinosaur they had come from when
we got back to the museum laboratory and prepared them properly.
Lowell began to investigate where the new embryo quarry fit in the
sequence of rock layers exposed along the ridges and across the flats.
Assisting in this enterprise were Julia Clarke and Javier Guevara.
Julia is a graduate student studying under Jacques Gauthier in the
Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale. Jacques is a close
friend and colleague whose research has greatly improved our under-
standing of the evolution of meat-eating dinosaurs and their evolu-
tionary links with birds. Julia actually played a dual role in the
activities of the expedition. In addition to collecting fossils, her geo-
