Friday, March 6, 2009

Fieldwork Friday #1

With spring slowly beginning to creep in here in western Colorado I thought I would start a series of post on fieldwork I am doing, have done, or will do (hopefully!). These might not be weekly until summer truly kicks in. Let me know if you enjoy this series...

Field Work Friday #1: Rabbit Valley

You will likely see many post on field work taking place in Rabbit Valley (BLM land - permit required to collect vertebrate remains; the A is not marking anything particular, by the way). It is very close to the museum I currently work for.


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This past Tuesday the weather here was great (high of 72!) with a strong westerly warm wind. We (John and I) had a map a museum volunteer had made in 1977, which was recently relocated during a deep cleaning of the museum. He had marked several sites on this map he had located over the years, a few of which we already knew about and had been collected by the museum in many years past. This site we had not visited so we took advantage of the great day and went out. It was a bit like a treasure hunt, looking for the "X" on the map. And our treasure was buried. Deeply. It is not going anywhere any time soon. The past 30+ years had partially covered the site. It had originally be identified to contain "Supersaurus" vertebra (this is in the Brushy Basin Member of the Morrison Formation), but once we located the site we realized it was "just" a Diplodocus. I also found some turtle material while at the site, so that was fun! We plan on going back when the weather warms back up (we have a week of rain/snow in our near future). Below are a few pictures from our first day in the field for 2009!!



© ReBecca K. Hunt-Foster, Treasure Map © www.uphaa.com

2 comments:

Tony Edger said...

Really enjoyed this post. Please consider at some point tracking something you find in the field through the collecting and curation steps. It would be great to follow that for someone like me who is not a professional.

ReBecca Hunt-Foster said...

Hi Tony,
That is a great idea! Thanks! I will do a few like that. And hopefully I will be able to update post like this is the future as we collect more things!
Thanks for reading :)