Matt, kind of give us an orientation here. We've got a lot of stuff. What do we have here?
Sure. So this is where we're bringing in the bones that we dug out in the field.
Okay.
And you can see that all these are wrapped in aluminum foil up here. And the reason
is because...
You're not going to cook them, are you?
No, hopefully not. I mean, we'll talk to whoever's in charge. But yeah,
the basic idea here is that we don't want a bone that we pulled out. If it does fall apart,
we don't want the pieces to get everywhere. So it keeps it inside the foil, keeps it safe for
when they bring back to Texas.
And these have been extracted by a number of individuals?
Yep. Yep. All across the area where we dig up bones, different people. And they put their names
on them. So you know who dug it out. And over here is where we keep all the kits for the stuff
we actually need to get the bones out. You can see there's lots of glue bottles. That's very
important.
This is the super glue?
That is the super glue.
What do you use this for?
Hopefully not getting your fingers together.
Yeah.
But mainly you want to put these bones back together. When they come out,
sometimes they'll be damaged by roots or even just the compaction from the sediment can fracture
them. And so you want to put glue on it to make sure it comes out one piece.
And what happens to these now? What's the next phase for all these?
Yeah. So what's going to happen is that these are going to be packed up. They'll put some of
this foam in here between them so they don't break. And they're going to bring them back to
Texas. And these are going to be prepared in a preparation lab there by people who know what
they're doing and take all the rest of the sediment off, make them nice. These over here,
this is a lot of work. There's a big femur here. There's another one there. And these have to be
in these plaster jackets because they're so big and heavy. We want to make sure that they stick
together. This is going to take a lot of extra time to actually prepare. You can see on there.
But these will go back to the lab as well?
They will go back to the lab, yeah.
And then will those bones that go back to the lab, are they going to try to be articulated?
What's the purpose of the next step?
Yeah. So there's lots of different things we can learn. Sometimes when you prepare these bones,
this one's nice because it kind of came out already prepared, you'll find what we consider
taphonomic marks. So marks that tell us a little bit about what happened at the death or in between
death and finding it as a fossil to these bones. So we've got a bone right here. And this is from
a tyrannosaur, but it's got tooth marks all over it. And usually you can't see these until after
you prepare it, but this bone was nice to us and already had them visible. So you can see that teeth
have been dragged along here, and that's telling us about animals eating each other, feeding,
and we can use that kind of evidence to help us build a story and tell what happened here.
How can you tell the difference between teeth mark and, let's say, just rolling over a rock
in a current? Yeah, that's a good question. This is one of the things we're actually studying as
kind of a team of graduate students, and there are certain signatures you can look for. One of
the things that's really helpful here, dinosaurs have little serrations on their teeth, like a
steak knife, you know, it's got the little edge there. And so if a dinosaur is dragging its tooth
on the surface, if it happens to drag slightly to the side, you're going to get this row of
little tiny scratches, and you can actually see one of those right here. And so that is where the
tooth was, it was coming down, and then it turned at the last minute. And so that's how, this one's
a really good example of a definite tooth mark there. Nothing else is going to leave that signature.
So something was chewing on that, but you don't know what it is. Well, that's what we want to know.
We do know it's a dinosaur because of the serrations. Things like crocodiles don't have
those. And based on the size, we're thinking it might be another tyrannosaur. So this could be
some kind of instance of cannibalism. And can you tell whether that was obviously being done during
a fight, or was it done after this just lying around on the ground? That's a really hard thing
to tell. So occasionally you get really lucky with a fossil, and you'll find like a tooth embedded in
it, and maybe you'll get healing around it, and you know, okay, that's a failed predation attempt
or something. But yeah, this could be at the moment of death, could be scavenging. I think it's not just
fighting. I think it's eating because of how deep these are, how many there are. It seems like
something was really trying to eat this. You seem to be pretty excited about this stuff. Yes, I am
very excited about this stuff. It's a lot of fun. And I understand you're doing your PhD work in this area.
Yeah. Tell us about that. Sure. Yeah, so I'm looking at — there's a bone bed up there that was
discovered only a few years ago, and it's called Rose Quarry. That's what we call it. And the bones
up there, they're kind of like this, where this isn't a whole bone, right? It's fractured on both
ends. You can see this bone right here is totally whole. So in the main quarries, we're getting bones
like this that are well-preserved, they look really nice, it's a whole bone. In Rose Quarry,
we're getting things that are beat up, they're damaged, they've been chewed on, they've been
stepped on. So we want to know what's going on at that site. And so we're studying the taphonomy. We
want to know what happened from the moment these animals died until we find them as fossils. So
that there, what's really cool is we've seen these really big chunks of mud in the middle of the
deposit, too. I mean, just huge, sometimes meter-diameter-type chunks. And that's telling us
something about the energy that was involved in this process. So these bones were tumbling around
in a flood event, and this ripped-up mud class, too. Those are getting moved along, and it's getting
deposited where we can find it today. So it's really cool work, because we get to learn how
that kind of stuff works out. So give us a definition for taphonomy. Yeah, so taphonomy,
it's the science of everything that happens to an organism from the moment it dies until you find it
as a fossil. So that could include things like scavenging, it could include breakage of bones,
how it got buried. Maybe it was buried, you know, in a lake or a river or something like that. It
can tell you about what's called diagenesis, which goes on inside while it's becoming a rock,
so different fluids flow through it, minerals, stuff like that. And so all those things are
telling, we put it all together and make a story out of it and try and understand what's going on.
So it's a little bit like CSI. Yeah, actually, it's a lot like CSI. You know, we, a lot of the
methods kind of overlap on those things. Now, the difference is that we're dealing with stuff that,
I mean, this is pretty much a rock now, even though it's still got bone material in it,
whereas CSI, they're hopefully dealing with something that hasn't been too long ago,
can put it together. Well, would you encourage other people to consider following you in this
area? Oh, absolutely. We need good paleontologists, we need good geologists. It's an exciting field to
be in and there's lots to do. Yeah, okay. Thanks, Matt. Appreciate it very much. Yeah.