Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
hehadresearchfundsavailabletobuymeanairlineticket,soIflewfromAtlantato
Bozeman, and within a day of my arrival he drove us to the field site. It was about
three hours away in southwestern Montana, an area of the country I had never be-
fore seen.
The nearest town of any notable size near the field site was Lima, which has a
population of just more than two hundred. Travel from the claustrophobic overpop-
ulation and traffic of metropolitan Atlanta to the unpeopled expanses of “Big Sky”
countryrequiressomementaladjustingforme,butisalwaysawelcomekindofdif-
ferent. During the drive, Dave and I caught up on what had been happening in our
lives the past few years, but he also filled me in on some of the details about what
led up to my seemingly improbable presence there with him, united by an ichnolo-
gically significant find.
This region of Montana had outcrops of the Blackleaf Formation, which was
composed of mudstones and sandstones formed by rivers during the middle of the
Cretaceous Period, about 95
mya
. Few fossils of any kind had been reported over
theyearsfromtheBlackleaf,butamongthoseweresomescrappyandvaguelyiden-
tified dinosaur bones. Apparently, this was enough incentive for Dave to decide it
was worth prospecting for more dinosaur material. So during the summer of 2005,
he gathered a group of experienced dinosaur-bone spotters and pickers to accom-
pany him to places with extensive exposures of the Blackleaf Formation, some of
which were on U.S. Forest Service land.
During one of their searches, one of the crew, Yoshi Katsura, spotted a few
bonesprotrudingfromahillside.Oncetheydeterminedthatthesewerefromasmall
ornithopod and that more remains were probably just underneath the surface, they
decided tocollect them. Theyexcavated aroundthepotential skeleton, notknowing
exactly what was there, but leaving plenty of rock around the exposed bits so that
the specimen would be as complete as possible. The field crew was happy about
the find because it meant that the Blackleaf might have dinosaur skeletons after all.
