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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, 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 are — 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 be — try to be articulated, or what will — 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 the rolling over a rock in a, you know, 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, and 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, 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. You 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.