field journal #11

it was just tony and me searching today. due to our chilling find of a possibly illegal dig yesterday, yumi was back at the tyrrell making an offical report about the site.

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despite this set back, we pressed on in trying to find either the lost quarrys of francis slate, and/OR a significant fossil find (a partial, or for that matter complete skeleton, how about a skull... i'd take anything at this point!!!)

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after the weeks i'd been pouring into this project, and not finding anything, i was losing hope. how could i not. they say that for every 200 hours you put into the field you should make one great discovery (assuming you've been looking in suitable places... which given this is alberta i sure had been!). well i was nearly up to 200 hours when i started, and now i certainly had achieved that time investment. yet still found nothing!

fortunately for me, tony is ever the optimist (though it helps that he was only just brought into this a few days ago!), and had a feeling we were going to have a big day. somehow he convinced me of that, and so we both charged into today's hunting rather eagerly.

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based on the information darren tanke had given me about francis slate, most of his drumheller region hunting had been done around the coal mines that were everywhere around here during the great canadian dinosaur rush. we'd already searched 4 old mining sites; the atlas, nacmine, star, and midland.

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today we'd came to the once monarch mine. it was close to the midland, and directly across the river from nacmine. we thought this end of the valley was more likely a candidate for slate's interest, and even if not a good one for us making a modern find. this area was nothing but horseshoe canyon era rocks, and thus should be full of dinosaurs.

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we had only been looking around an hour or two when tony called to me in excitement...

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as i walked up, tony modestly said. "i think i've found something." now, this might sound like he was unsure, but you have to know tony to get what he was saying.

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translated from tony speak, what he actually said was "i just found the coolest thing we're going to see all day." however as he is such a nice and under spoken guy, he doesn't ever say it this way... just going out into the field with him a few times i've learned...

i started to get excited.

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this is why i'd wanted tony to help me out in the first place. he is a fossil magnet, which for whatever reason; better eyesight, or more patience, or he was just born with natural luck, means he tends to make huge finds where the rest of us might find the usual stuff.

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taking my own look, tony certainly had found "something". it was a bonebed. however these bones were different somehow... i couldn't put my claw on what about them though.

"check out this tooth," tony beckoned to me from a metre away.

it was an albertosaur tooth. a really nice albertosaur tooth.

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however i found my enthusiasm sinking. you find albertosaur teeth in bonebeds all the time, as my ancient relatives would come in to scavenge the free meals that were the animals about to become a bonebed. in the process they'd lose some teeth which you'd find mixed in with the bones.

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meaning this was becoming just another ordinary bonebed...

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however a moment after my hopes began to sink, tony corrected me on where i was looking. "no, not that one," and pointed at a tooth just a few centimetres away. "this one."

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it was another albertosaur tooth. only it was much bigger. plus it was shaped differently.

now having very similar teeth to these myself, i knew immediately what i was looking at!

this was a big deal. this was a huge deal!

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what tony had just found was an albertosaur tooth with its root still attached to it! not something you commonly find. in a bonebed or anywhere else!

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we dinosaurs, unlike you mammals, continually grew new teeth in all the time to replace broken or woren ones. meaning we were shedding them all the time. however when we shed them we didn't typically lose the root with it. normally we'd just reabsorb the root back into our jaws.

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meaning either something really terrible had happened to this albertosaur, and he'd lost tooth and root (it'd happened to me only ONCE {i've lost 103 teeth so far in my life} when i was younger and wanted to get some money from the tooth fairy. i tied a string to the back of craig's car and my tooth, and well... when the tooth and root followed the car and i didn't. NOT a nice feeling!). or the much much MUCH more likely scenario that (as something like my car scheme wasn't too common 70 million years ago!... if it'd happened back then it would have been a terrible illness or injury that'd knock the root loose with the tooth) this tooth and root had come out of the jaw soon after the albertosaur died...

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which with the two teeth so close together in front of me (with a canadian one dollar coin, a loonie, for scale in the photo) suddenly i realized what we were looking at... it explained why the bones had felt different from normal drumheller bonebeds. more importantly we'd made a huge find!

this wasn't an edmontosaur bonebed at all... it was an albertosaur one!

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though we couldn't tell at moment whether it was just one really torn apart albertosaur or a whole bunch of them, this was just the sort of find we'd been wanting to make.

i was so glad i'd brought tony along with me today!!!

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at the same time i couldn't help but feel kind of useless... afterall i'd been the one out here for days and days, and in the end i wasn't needed at all! which was kind of a bummer.

still don't hold that against tony. credit is due where credit is due, afterall...

it took a while for the overwhelming joy and excitement of realizing what he'd found to wear off... then we finished analysing what little we could from the exposed bones on the surface. there was going to have to be a formal dig to unearth anything conclusive from this site. coming to that conclusion we finally peeled ourselves up from the bonebed with the intent of looking around the area a bit more (two finds would certainly be better than one at the end of the day!).

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standing up, and lifting my eyes off the ground for the first time in minutes, i had a funny feeling. as i couldn't figure out why, i happily resumed talking to tony about our next direction of exploration... suddenly my tiny mind had a brain wave!

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i shot my head back up... leaving tony hanging on me mid sentence.

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i just stared ahead for a minute in silence.

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tony asked me worriedly. "what is it?"

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"we have to get back to the museum right now!" i said urgently, a million thoughts were going through my head.

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"why?" tony asked in disbelief.

my stomach had just turned to butterflies, and my head was rather light (my small brain was overwhelmed by the realization i'd just made). tony might be the fossil magnet, and his find was pretty cool... but i'd just pulled my weight for today! and then some...

if it hadn't been for tony, we wouldn't have found this spot. so he was important (where i had not been). however, had i not been here the overall significance of this spot would have been missed, making me now equally important. i point this out not to boost (well okay maybe a little!) but to say, that both of us being there today lead to hopefully the biggest discovery of the year in alberta! just one of us would have missed the whole picture...

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i'd tell you more right now people of the innerweb, but i have to get back to the tyrrell right now, and let them know what we just found!!!

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to be continued...

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Palaeo CHALLENGE... what did we just find???