Field season does not look much like the documentaries. There is no music, the reveal takes weeks rather than minutes, and most days end with a notebook entry rather than a discovery. Here is what a season on our Converse County excavations, run in partnership with regional universities, actually involves.
Prospecting comes first
Before anything is dug, somebody walks. Crews cover exposures on foot, heads down, looking for fragments of bone that have weathered out of the slope and tumbled downhill. A scatter of fragments is a trail: follow it up the slope and, if you are fortunate, you find the point where the pieces stop coming, which is roughly where the rest of the animal is still buried. Most trails lead to a single broken piece and nothing more. That is normal, and it is still data.
Opening a quarry
Once something is worth pursuing, the overburden comes off, sometimes with picks and shovels, sometimes with a jackhammer where the rock is hard. Work slows dramatically as the crew approaches bone level and switches to awls, dental picks and brushes. Every specimen is mapped in place before it moves. Position, orientation and the sediment around it carry information about how the animal died and what happened to it afterwards, and none of that can be recovered later.
Jackets, and the long wait
Fossil bone is fragile and often cracked through. To travel, it gets a plaster jacket: the specimen is undercut on a pedestal, wrapped in a separator layer, then covered in plaster-soaked burlap until it is a solid block. Some blocks are light enough to carry out. Others need a lot of people and, occasionally, machinery.
The jacket is where public patience usually runs out. Preparation in the lab routinely takes far longer than excavation did, and a single well-preserved skull can absorb hundreds of hours under a microscope before anyone can say much about it with confidence.
The notebook is the point
A fossil without its context is an ornament. The field notes, the quarry map, the GPS position and the stratigraphic section are what turn a bone into evidence, and they are what allows another researcher, decades from now, to ask a question nobody has thought of yet.
Why students are on the crew
Working alongside regional universities is deliberate. Excavation is a craft learned by doing it badly under supervision until you do it well, and Wyoming rock is an unusually good classroom. Some of those students will become the people running these quarries, and we would rather they learned here.
