North Dakota Dinosaur Dig: Part 2

Here's post number 2 about my dinosaur hunting trip. (Be sure to read part 1 first!) I present, Tuesday.

Tuesday we headed out to the Triceratops site. This is a site where they were working on a partially complete triceratops. It was very neat to see, though a bit confusing as the skeleton was not complete. I know what a sacrum and ilium are but I'm guessing the kids didn't and had a harder time making sense of the jumble of bones. I wasn't going to include a photo because unless you know what you are looking at it just looks like a shot of the ground and some rocks. I figured what the heck, why not include it. I think it is telling. Take a look at the photo to the left. Can you see the triceratops? This illustrates nicely why this is such slow work. The fossils are hard to locate and often very fragile.

The previous day, a group had made a plaster field jacket for the triceratops femur so we helped haul that out. It was very heavy. I believe this was one of the only pieces taken out as this was the last week of the season and there was not time to remove the entire dinosaur. It would have to be capped for the winter so that it would not degrade now that it was exposed. That's me in the green on the back right getting ready to lower the femur down a small hill. I think the dark blotch on the horizon might be the truck we were carrying it to. We stopped to rest a lot. The field jacket consists of a 2x4 for support, some foil and a lot of plaster strips. The femur was enormous.



While waiting to carry out the femur I did a little prospecting and located a rich trail of bone fragments coming down the hillside maybe 100 feet from the triceratops. I called the rest of the group over and we followed the pieces up to the top of the hill where they stopped. We dug a little but didn't find anything. The two experts with us looked at some of the pieces we found and could tell that they were triceratops frill. It was really cool to follow the trail and start looking for more even though we didn't turn up anything. They hadn't found the head of the triceratops they were excavating 100 feet away so perhaps it disassociated when it died and we were finding pieces of the head of the one they were digging up. Who knows.

Here I am doing a little cleaning up on a different piece of frill. You can see the lines from where the blood vessels were. If you think that triceratops were cold blooded then you think the blood vessels were there to help heat up the dinosaurs via passive solar collection. If you think they were warm blooded then the blood vessels may have helped it cool down. I'll leave that debate to the experts.

FYI: The stylish latex gloves are actually to keep paint and chemicals off my hands as we were making plastic casts of dinosaur teeth and talons on the table in the background.


Later that day we climbed to the top of a butte and felt one of the strongest winds I've ever felt in my life. I took this clip of video but it doesn't do the force of the wind justice. You can get a good view of the basin we are about to descend into as I pan across the landscape. I know it isn't the best video but it also gives you an idea of the landscape.



Atop this bluff we collected some of the K-T boundary. This is the geologic boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. This layer of ash comes from the meteorite impact that slammed into the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago and almost ended all life on earth. The actual K-T boundary here is very visible, one of the best spots on earth to see it. You can even see yellow ribbons of iridium in the black. Iridium in this concentration generally only comes from meteors.

For reference, check out this satellite photo.


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The marker marks the exact spot we collected the KT boundary. Can you see why they call this the Hell Creek formation? It isn't a real hospitable location. The basin to the south of the butte is where we spent the day hiking and looking for fossils.

We headed down into the basin and scouted out several cool sites. We found many pieces of turtle shell. Most pieces were about the size of a quarter.

The pieces I found are from trionychid turtles such as this one. The complete one in the photo is a replica in the Warner Nature Center collection. For size reference, that is a standard countertop it is sitting on and the fossil takes up the entire depth of the counter. These large turtles are related to the soft shelled turtles that inhabit rivers today. The basic turtle design is evolutionarily very robust and has changed little over time.

At one particularly interesting site after lunch I picked up some broken pieces of fossil that had washed into a small wash coming off a hillside. Since the pieces were found close together (within a five foot stretch) and all appeared similar I put them into their own bag and asked our leader about them. He said they were from a turtle and that I could keep them as they were just broken scrap type pieces. I took them home and to my delight two of the pieces fit together. As I played with them a second piece fell into place and then a third, then a fourth. All in all there were 18 pieces and 9 of them fit together but they don't add up to much.

What I can tell is that it is a portion of the anterior right plastron of a turtle. I have one piece of carapace as well. You can see the curved up portion where the plastron would have connected to the carapace of the turtle. It seems about twice as thick as the trionychid shell pieces we found so I need to do some digging to get and idea of what species I'm dealing with. My impression is that trionychid turtles did not have such solid plastrons.

I had a great time putting all the pieces together. I just wish I had a whole turtle to work with! It was a like a fantastic challenging jigsaw puzzle but in the end, instead of a photo of a basket full of puppies or kittens, you end up with a fossil of an animal that lived 65 million years ago. Pretty damn cool.

We continued on our hike through the basin learning about geology and fossils until our water ran out and we needed to head back. We spotted a badly crumbled hadrosaur femur on the ground and noted it with GPS before turning for home. Maybe another group can look longer at this area next season.

That's all for Today. Come back tomorrow for Part 3!

~Kirk

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North Dakota Dinosaur Dig: Part 1

Over the next four days I'll be recounting the dinosaur dig I went on in the summer of 2007 with the Marmarth Research Foundation. Here's Part One.

In the summer of 2006, I taught my regular Fossils to Feathers summer camp where we dig up local fossils from the Ordovician and then talk about birds and how birds are related to life that existed earlier. It is basically a class about evolution. Fellow Warner naturalist Bekah Dalen brought in some fossils to show me over the summer. She said she got them on a dinosaur dig while working at the Children's Museum. Hmm, we thought, why don't we lead a dinosaur dig though work?

Here were the two selling points.

1. Digging up dinosaurs
and
2. Getting paid to do it

Need I say more?

We offered the summer camp in the summer of 2007 and we took seven 6-8th grade kids on a 10 hour van ride to the far nether regions of North Dakota to root around in the famous Hell Creek Formation. (Okay, famous to other geeks, geologists and paleo-types.)

We worked with Marmarth Research Foundation and the week was tons of fun. Fossil wise we found many pieces of trionychid turtles and parts of other species of turtles. We found champsosaur bones, a hadrosaur femur, a triceratops femur, a triceratops tooth, dromeosaur teeth, fossil trees, crocodile teeth, freshwater ray teeth, triceratops frill and more. The pictures tell a good story so let's start there.

We set out on Sunday for the 10 hour ride to Marmarth, ND. The highlight of the trip was of course stopping to gawk at Salem Sue the world's largest holstein cow statue in New Salem, ND. That's six tons of reinforced fiberglass in the shape of a cow up there on that butte. She's actually the world's largest fiberglass animal. Okay so the picture is awful. Follow the link for up close giant cow bliss. This is largest cow I've ever seen. It is much larger than Chatty Belle.

We arrived in Marmarth just in time for dinner. The kids were interested in what the food would be so we joked with them that it would be Tater Tot hotdish. We fell out of the van and into the cafe only to discover that dinner that night was indeed tater tot hotdish. That night we got our room assignments in the Marmarth Bunkhouse. The bunkhouse was built for railway workers back in the old days. As far accommodations for a dinosaur dig this was posh. Most digs involve sleeping in tents so this was nice. There was a phone, showers, private rooms and satellite TV. Weirdly, the kids all wanted to watch shows about serial killers while I preferred spongebob. Go figure.

Monday morning we headed out to a site where kids a few years ago uncovered a hadrosaur femur. There is still probably more of the dino inside the hillside but a LOT of rock would have to be removed to get at it. Maybe someday, but for now there are easier quarry. I found one of my first cool things here. It was a little piece of a trionychid turtle shell. It was thrilling but little did I know I would be seeing thousands of such parts in the next few days. This site was also home to many many modern rodent bones as a large owl roosted in the area and the ground was littered with bones and owl pellets. Our leader, Doug Hanks, showed us a profile of the rock in the area and taught us how to read the record of what had happened there. Here he is explaining the term orogeny to the kids, as in the Rocky Mountain Orogeny. A couple of days later he asked the kids, "And what do we call that event that was happening to the west at this time?" To which one of the kids replied, "Oh! The Rocky Mountain Orgy!" He realized what he said as soon as it came out, he turned bright red and we all had a good laugh.

Monday afternoon we headed out to another area to work on a site rich in turtles. It is apparently one of the richest turtle sites in the world. We didn't see any. Such is this line of work. I used an exacto knife to slowly carve out a one foot square area. In an hour our so I went down about four inches. This is the very unglamourous part of field work i.e. carefully looking for nothing. The area I worked in was where they had just removed six complete turtles so it was important to keep searching. It was too bad we didn't uncover anything but that's part of the job too.

Dinner Monday was meatloaf hotdish. We ate LOTS of hotdish (that would be casserole to you non-midwesterners) When I say meatloaf I mean many many pounds of ground beef tossed into a pan, covered in ketchup and baked. I think there may have been a can of "cream of something" soup mixed in. Welcome to flavor country. Why didn't I take any pictures of the food?

That's it for the first installment. Return tomorrow for Part 2.

~Kirk

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Black Bears in the Twin Cities Metro

This is a photo of a black bear that showed up at the feeders a few years back at the nature center where I work. On any given day I assume there are black bears in the woods but it isn't something I think about that much or worry about. Just today the kids asked me, "Are there bears in the woods here?" I told them that there sure are bears but we never see them because they are much too afraid of us. That's true. The only time we see bears at the nature center is long after all the screaming kids have left and no one is outside. They know when we're out and about and keep far away. The only reason I was able to get this photo was that I was inside and the bear couldn't see me. I think that bear is just gorgeous.

There was another story in the news last week about a bear being shot in the two cities metro. A black bear wandered into North St. Paul. For those readers not from the Twin Cities, North St. Paul is a city to the north of the capital city, St. Paul. It isn't just the north part of the city of St. Paul. Still though, this is not a rural area. North St. Paul is a fairly typical suburb.

To get an idea of how developed this area is check out this map. The bear no doubt came from less developed areas to the northeast but there's a lot of developed area out there it had to cross. This bear somehow crossed Interstate 694!



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According to the Associated Press story, DNR officers shot bean bags at the bear to scare it down from a tree. This seemed pretty unsuccessful as it took 90 minutes for the bear to decide to come down to the ground where the animals with guns were shooting at it. Apparently, the bear was near an elementary school so state policy is to shoot the bear as it could be a public threat. I was able to dig up that the bear was near the corner of 13th and Margaret Street and was surprised when I read that. The elementary school in question is one I go to every year to do classroom outreach. There are a number of other schools very close by as well.

The bear was shot and killed. The DNR says they didn't have time to prepare tranquilizer equipment before the bear came down from the tree. I'm not sure I buy that story since they say that they were shooting bean bags at the bear for 90 minutes before it came down. I don't have a lot of experience with tranquilizer guns but I'm assuming they don't take more than 90 minutes to load.

Still, I'm not saying they made the wrong decision. Many people think bears that wander into suburban neighborhoods should be simply moved and not killed. It isn't so simple though. Where should they be moved to? Suitable bear habitat is likely already taken up by other bears That is exactly why young bears wander into the suburbs, the suitable habitat nearby is already taken and they are looking for new territory. Transporting them further away doesn't change this equation. It causes me sadness to admit this but they probably did the right thing. I hate the idea that there is a "right" and "wrong" place for nature and that we can't tolerate wildlife living near us but that ignores the real habitat needs of the bears as well.

Bears can't really be left alone in the suburbs. A suburban landscape of backyards, shopping centers and schools is not appropriate habitat and a negative human-bear encounter will eventually happen. The bears are fine out here at the nature center even with our 15,000 visitors a year because they have many square miles of woods where they can go to be alone and as far from us as possible.

Unfortunately, there are more of us every year and less habitat for bears. I expect we'll be seeing more of this in the coming years.

~Kirk

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First of the Season Junco!

Just a quick phonology note here. The bird banders at the Lee & Rose Warner Nature Center caught the first-of-the-season Slate-colored Dark-eyed Junco while banding this morning. For those not in the know, these birds are also called the "snow birds" as they are the harbingers of winter. When the Juncos arrive from their breeding grounds to the north, you can be sure winter and snow are not far behind. With today's driving wind and a high temperature in the mid-fifties that isn't too hard to imagine. This is early for Juncos though. I usually don't see them in any numbers until mid-October.

~kirk

(photo Credit: Ken Thomas)

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International Blasphemy Day

Today is International Blasphemy Day, originally created to celebrate free speech in the wake of the flap over the danish cartoons back in 2005. So, here's my contribution this year.


In the next week I'll be posting up a four part story detailing the dinosaur dig I went on a few years back so if you are offended by, well, reality, then be sure not to read those posts.

~Kirk

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Bark Beetle Larva

As promised, a few more photos from the fungus hike. While hiking down the trail we noticed this interesting tree. There seemed to be a sort of powder covering the ground under the tree. You can see it in the photo below. Since we were in fungus mode we began to speculate on a fungal origin to the powder.


Could it be a mold? Many times molds will form a dusty looking power on leaves or the ground. People on the hike were leaning toward that explanation until I took a closer look at the trunk of the tree. I noticed bark beetle holes in the exposed trunk wood. Many of these holes had a fine powder of sawdust sticking out of them. The beetle larva are hard at work gnawing at the tree and leaving behind a super powdery trail of sawdust. It was incredible to see such a covering of dust on the ground from the action of these tiny larva.

So, not a fungus but really cool none the less.

~Kirk

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Fungus Hike

I had the pleasure this week to go on a fungus hike at work with a former president of the Minnesota Mycological Society.

Fungi are not my strong suit as a naturalist so it was fascinating to go on a hike with her and learn more. Here's some of what we came across on our short hike.

First up is Ischnoderma resinosum. If you're not familiar with fungi I should point out here that many of them don't have common names. This is a polypore mushroom that grows on the sides of fallen dead trees in the woods. It is a saprobe meaning it feeds off of and helps decompose dead wood.


If you're not at all familiar with mushrooms, what you are looking at above is considered the fruiting body of the fungus. Most of the fungus is actually inside the wood of the tree. When the fungus is ready to reproduce it creates the "mushroom" we're familiar with who's purpose is to create and spread spores.
Here's a view of Ischnoderma resinosum growing on the same log but in a grouping.


Here's one with a human hand for size reference.



Just above this grouping was something strange on the log. Take a look at the photo below.


According to our guide, this is also Ischnoderma resinosum. Size wise the sticky clump on this fungus is about the size of a quarter. In order to release the spores from the mushroom they must be very dry. According to our guide the mushroom excretes resin as a way to get rid of excess water. I hope I understood that correctly.

Up next was slime mold. Slime molds are one of the most fascinating things in the woods and I really need to take some time to learn more about them. They are not molds as their name suggests. They are not even fungi. Mycologists study them out of tradition but technically they are in their own special group distinct from fungi. Much of the time, slime molds are plasmodium. A plasmodia is a mass of protoplasm without a cell wall. It is sort of amoeba like in this sense. Slime mold plasmodia can actually move! They slowly move over the surface of a given material such as a log and surround bacteria, protozoa, etc. and using them as a nutrient source. eventually, the plasmodia undergo a change and turn into a structure to produce spores. Unlike fungi which penetrate trees and then just produce a fruiting body on the surface, slime molds spend their entire time at the surface. What you see is what you get. What you get can very wildly in appearance though.

Check out this cool photo. That's a red oak leaf in the foreground for some size reference. These were very small. These are the spore producing sporangia (spore cases) of the slime mold Stemonitis sp. It is sometimes called chocolate tube slime.

Here's another slime mold in spore bearing mode. This is the insect-egg slime mold. If you click to view the full size image you can see that they are not perfect spheres. They have a little elongated section where they attach to the tree.


Venturing deeper into the forest we came upon this vey large specimin of Hypsizygus ulmarius growing on a box elder. This is a really fun fungus as it smells like a really nice perfume. It is subtle but nice. Who would have thought?


Up next was Turkey Tail. A common fungus I thought I knew. I turns out though that there is also a false Turkey Tail. The one pictured below is a true turkey tail. The true form is a polypore fungus. On the underside are thousands of little pores all packed together. If you have good eyes you can see them with your naked eyes but a 10x loupe does wonders. The underside of false Turkey Tail, by contrast, is smooth.


Toward the end of our hike we passed an area with a lot of oak bark woodchips. This is the site where we set up a portable sawmill to deal with all the downed trees after a tornado swept though the nature center last year. The ground is covered with decomposing bark and it was a great place to look for fungus. We couldn't help but notice this huge fawn mushroom. You can see why it is considered a "gilled" mushroom. The top of these mushrooms are fawn colored which gives them their common name.


My camera ran out of batteries so there were many fungi we found that I was not able to photograph. I did get a photo of one more though. It was actually growing at the base of the large red oak in the background of the above picture. The fungus below is one of three Peziza sp. that I found. It is a cup fungus.

That's all for the fungus. Stop back in the next few days. I have a couple of photos of something else fun I found on the hike.

~Kirk

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