Back to the...Mid-Holocene!

I'm heading back to Niger to continue excavations at Gobero, an early-mid Holocene habitation and burial site that was on the shore of a lake, that has long since vanished. Follow the team's progress at: Project Exploration's Green Sahara Online Expedition

Below is a photo from the 2006 field expedition to Gobero!

Ice Age Texas

This past weekend, a crew from the Dallas Paleontological Society excavated mammoth bones reported from a creek bed in Sherman, TX. The steep side of the creek (see below) made for some tricky logistics, only a few people could fit on the ‘excavation perch’ at a time and the plaster jackets (containing the fossils) had to be lifted out by a crane. A cable – which claimed to be able to support 2000 lbs – broke and we all watched in horror as one of the jackets came tumbling back down! Luckily it didn’t break open, so gluing the pieces inside together will be all in a day’s work for the preperators at the Museum of Nature and Science who open the jacket. Here's a pic and a news article about the dig:

Dallas Paleo Society members covering the bones in a plaster field jacket

For more on the mammoth excavation see the WFAA-TV article here. (And don't be fooled by the article's title - it's a Columbian Mammoth, not a Woolly Mammoth.)

A Triceratops moves into the MNS

I just finished my first week at the Dallas Museum of Nature and Science and already so much has happened. On Friday, a triceratops skeleton was assembled in the museum lobby over the course of the afternoon and drew quite a few onlookers. The triceratops is made of 75% original fossil bone with plastics casts making up the rest of the skeleton. The new triceratops was mounted and assembled by the Heritage Auction Galleries and will be at the museum through June, when it will be up for auction.

Seeing double in Fort Worth

At an event at the Fort Worth Museum of History and Science, I came face to face with... myself. In the paleontology hall, a picture taken in Dr. Paul Sereno's fossil lab of me preparing an abelisaurid pelvis is part of the display about how fossils are prepared for museum display. I'm taking it as a good sign during my first week living in Texas!