Remote area of Wyoming draws team of paleontologists every summer
On any given day in the middle of summer, in the rugged terrain of the Big Horn Basin, near Cody, Wyoming, you'll find a team of paleontologists digging away on the Jurassic Mile dig site, unearthing dinosaur fossils that are more than 150 million years old. Here's a look at how weather impacts the process of finding and recovering these ancient fossils.
Set in Wyoming's Bighorn Basin, surrounded by mountain ranges and reachable via only a treacherous, mostly dirt road, is a remote excavation site. There, on any given summer day, visitors can find professionals from The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, The Natural History Museum of London, Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands and the University of Manchester.
The mile-square plot of land is known as The Jurassic Mile and the paleontologists assembled there are all working to unearth the wealth of information it holds about life in the Jurassic Period, as part of a project dubbed Mission Jurassic.
The hope is that the Jurassic Mile will be able to paint the most complete picture modern humans have ever been able to put together of the Jurassic Period, through its unique combination of fossil bones, fossilized plants and trackways.
“What makes the dig here so unique is that we have an amazing array of fossils from the Jurassic period. These fossils include the bones of some of the largest dinosaurs ever to walk on the planet, but also their trackways, which are incredibly rare. As well as the trackways, we have fossil plants and other invertebrates from around this amazing site. It is truly a world-class site,” Phil Manning, lead scientist on the project as well as the scientist-in-residence at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and chair of natural history at the University of Manchester, told AccuWeather.
The dig site is currently split into four quarries. A lower quarry was at one point in history an oxbow lake, while the upper quarries were formerly a river channel. The latter show evidence of a log jam, where deceased dinosaurs would have essentially piled up, pushed along by the river, creating a mass of fossils.
“We keep hitting bone everywhere we move. That’s a fantastic problem to have, because we have a fairly complete dinosaur and multiple dinosaurs … but now it’s just trying to figure out the safest way to move [the fossils, both] safe for the bones and safe for the crew that’s working here,” explained Dr. Victoria Egerton, also a scientist-in-residence at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and a research fellow at the University of Manchester.
Some of the dinosaurs found within the Jurassic Mile that most people are familiar with include Allosaurus and Brachiosaurus.
However, it’s not just the dinosaur fossils that excite Egerton, who is also a paleobotanist. She uses the evidence contained in logs like those mentioned above, as well as fine plant materials and preserved leaves and ferns, to learn more about the Jurassic Period’s climate and environment.
“The preservation quality and sheer amount of plants at the Jurassic Mile is extraordinary. During this period, there were no flowering plants and this site provides significant insight to what these giant animals ate and how they may have grown to be so large,” she said.
Egerton and the rest of the excavation team are also looking for non-dinosaur animal fossils, including small reptiles, amphibians and mammals. Using an automated sieving machine her team fondly refers to as “Hank,” the scientists can sort through sediment and clay to pick apart bones and teeth for later lab analysis.
The team has a very limited field season that runs from May through the end of August. The rest of the year, the site lies untouched and uninhabited, but not unprotected, due to the team’s winterization process.
“When we leave for the field season, we have to carefully cover up all the bones. We use a mixture of tarps and semi-permeable material,” explained Egerton. “We also cover them up with about four to six inches of dirt. We do that to keep the bones from having to undergo freeze thaw.”
Freeze thaw can cause fossilized bones to split or crack, resulting in extra work for the paleontologists at a later date.
When it’s time to resume excavating the next summer, it can take up to two weeks to remove the dirt and tarps, which add up to several tons of sediment.
The current Mission Jurassic team has spent three seasons at the excavation site thus far, but the job is nowhere near complete. The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis holds a 20-year lease on the parcel of land and intends to continue work there throughout and possibly beyond that timeframe. The fossil remains will form the base of an expansion of the museum’s permanent Dinosphere exhibit. Within the next few weeks, there will be a few hundred new bones at the museum, some of which will be on display as they’re cleaned and prepped in the soon-to-be expanded Jurassic Paleo Prep Lab, opening Sept. 10.
