Well, I am way behind, so let's catch up. So, I did deliver the theropod bones to the Royal Tyrrell. I also emailed them a lot of pictures showing the location and the GPS settings so that they can check the site further when it works for them. I hope it’s okay to mention that Dr. Therrien noted in his email reply that, in the pictures at least, it looked like it might be a rib bone but, rib bones aren’t supposed to be hollow, and these clearly are. So, it’s a mystery and solving mysteries is what scientists do. I will let you know what more they have to say when they actually get a chance to look at them in the flesh, so to speak. I don’t know when that will be. I just note that paleontologists often don’t look at these things for years because they have so much material coming in and only so much time. Right now, the Royal Tyrrell displays less than 1% of the specimens they possess. The other 99% plus are in storage, or technicians are preparing them for examination, or they are waiting to be examined by paleontologists. You’d have to have something pretty intriguing to get their attention right away. But let’s return to the badlands where I left you last week. I hope you weren’t lonely out there!
After collecting my treasure and feeling ridiculously satisfied about it, I went up the ridge to a hilltop plateau and sat and drank water and snacked on grapes and a banana and watched the clouds slip by. I had been out for probably three hours at that point. Then I started leafing through a nearby rock, ‘leafing’ being the word you’ll want to note. A large rock had split into a hundred perfect layers, and they were splayed open, like pages in a book, maybe a couple of millimetres thick, all containing fragments of flora. I am out of my depth on Cretaceous plant life. That said, I have a book on my nightstand that will, hopefully, shed some light on all that. Fossilized wood is all over in the badlands and it’s common to see imprints of pieces of wood in ironstone, but finding an identifiable imprint of a leaf, for instance, would be unusual and, in my eccentric world, exciting. I looked through a few of these ‘pages’ but left them there for further examination another day.
(I interrupt this tale to mention that Mac the golden retriever just walked along the back of the couch I’m sitting on and sat on my head while dangling a toy and playing tug of war with Buddy the golden. The indignities I endure to bring you this!!)
I then decided to walk down the channel I had just been in. It was slow slog. I would walk 10 metres and then have to climb up and over a bridge or arch. Occasionally there’s room to walk under an arch. There’s lot to see, including lots of dinosaur bone. That’s what I was searching for but the badlands decide what they will reveal, when and to whom. I was a hundred metres from the end of the channel, where it spills out on to the valley floor, and this was hanging out of the channel wall, staring at me.
So, I’m assuming a bison, but I have no idea. It could be a unicorn. It could be a cow that perished 5 years ago for all I know, but it would be an adventurous and unlucky cow that was in that steep and forbidding country where there is little to graze on. And it appears to be a pelvis but maybe it’s a skull. It also doesn’t appear to be mineralized but it does have that patina that suggests some age (anything, over 10,000 years old is considered a fossil). Maybe it’s some other kind of Cenozoic critter (as in the age of mammals, from 65 million years ago to the present day). It’s also embedded in that probably seven-foot-high wall and it would be a bit of a deal to pull it out which you’re not allowed to do anyway if you suspect it might be a fossil.
Anyway, I will send the pics to the too patient people at the museum who will probably sigh as they open yet another email from me. I mostly expect them to say it’s probably a bison, and there are lots of bison bones in the badlands and please don’t email us anymore and maybe take up another hobby.
Anyway, I will keep you posted on the outcome, assuming my email doesn’t accidentally and understandably, get deleted.