Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
many years because she had worked with us at the American Museum
of Natural History in New York. On this expedition, she was our
chief fossil excavator, and her immense talents as a preparator would
prove critical because later she assumed the responsibility for prepar-
ing the delicate fossils preserved inside some of the eggs.
Some of the blocks of mudstone we collected contained more
than twenty eggs. Before transporting them, Luis tried to put our
minds at ease by assuring us that the blocks were not much larger or
heavier than a typical
jamon
—a Spanish ham. With the protective
plaster bandages that enveloped them, however, some actually
assumed the proportions of a healthy sow, weighing in at several
hundred pounds. As you might imagine, these turned out to be dif-
ficult to move, even with a lot of people helping to pull and lift. Fur-
thermore, as is often the case in the field, we could not drive our truck
all the way to the place where we had found the eggs. To get the heavy
blocks down the hill to the truck, Luis and Rodolfo borrowed a large
sheet of scrap metal from Dona Dora. After punching some holes at
each corner of the sheet and attaching ropes, they had a makeshift
"sled" on which we could put the blocks and slide them down the hill.
In deference to Luis's original description of the blocks, this con-
traption was affectionately dubbed "the ham luge." To move the
blocks, some crew members pulled on the ropes in front, while others
steadied the block and the sled with the ropes attached to the back.
It took almost all our crew members to move the blocks about fifty
yards from the quarry down the hill to the trucks. Lifting them into
the back of the pickup also proved challenging, but with everyone's
help, we managed it.
Following the move, Lowell collected more rock samples in hopes
that they might contain fossilized microscopic pollen. The shape of a
pollen grain is quite specific for each species of plant, and particular
assemblages of fossil pollen are often restricted to narrow intervals of
geologic time. If we were fortunate enough to find fossil pollen in the
rocks at the site, this would provide clues about the kinds of plants
that lived on or near the floodplain where the dinosaurs had laid their
eggs, as well as about the age of the eggs. However, such analyses
would once again have to wait until we got the samples back to the
laboratory.
We spent a few more days looking at exposures of rocks in the
