The Excavatrix

[埋込みオブジェクト:http://www.youtube.com/v/ZtRGYflv9pA?fs=1&hl=en_US]

It has been eventful times this fall. Aside from uncovering hundreds of new fossils we've been involved in a couple other fun activities like speaking to volunteer Mary Simun's AP Environmental Studies class and having a table at NHM's Haunted Museum where we educated on the 3 sloths found at RLB

NHMs Haunted Museum

Also, there have been some major staffing changes. We celebrated Chris Shaw's retirement and are also now fully staffed (except for Collections Manager) Karin Rice and Laura are now full-time, and Christina Lutz is part-time. Congrats to all!

Now for some needed box updates!

I know that some are wondering what has been up with box 1, and that is...a bit of remodeling, pedestaling, and power digging. Box 1 currently has some of the most curious and hardest grids to excavate which has lead us to take slightly different approaches to traditional digging. We are now "pedestaling" around the main fossil deposit in the south end. This means taking the matrix around the bones down to deeper grid levels without removing the bones. This creates a side view of how they are in place which helps us see how the deposit formed. To easier accomplish that excavation approach a "window" was removed from the south wall next to the bones so that someone can stand outside the box and excavate from the side as Tara demonstrates here, working across from Michelle.

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The rest of the open grids in box 1 are sterile and difficult which means its time to bring out the power tools if we want to get this box done in the next 10 years. Michelle and I have been using the pneumatic hammer and Herb brought in his electric hammer which proved very useful in clearing out half of a grid in one day. Here's Michelle digging her "hole to China" in a hard sterile grid next to the bone deposit.

Michelle in box 1 hole

And 7A?

Since 7A was re-opened on the 7th of July all of the "C" grids from level 3 to the bottom boards have been completed (roughly 4 tons of matrix) and now we are well into the B grids

box 7A 10-26

The major fossil finds are 3 horse cervical vertebrae. Other bones have been sparse - just a few bones from smaller animals and random worn large bone frags. There are however gastropods galore

striped-shell from 7A

And some neat geology has been revealed, such as this wavy silt/clay structure that was probably created by asphalt deforming soft sediment

Box 7A Sedimentary Structure

Volunteers have been great at chiseling though the tough old asphaltic stream beds of 7A.

Pat Simun helps in 7A

Everyone still loves the safety glasses which are a necessity in 7A...but will they protect Karin from Justin's apparent backstabbing...?

we love our safety glasses

With their help, including the "Master Chiseler" Jack (aka The Chiserater, Jack the Chipper, or The Grand Chizier) who competes with Herb as to who can produce the most buckets in a day, we will probably have this box finished within the next couple of months.

And there's continual awesomeness in the large box 14 deposit:

I like to call it a fossil buffet
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Here's a closer look at the dire wolf skull that was "biting" our box 14 juvenile mastodon's scapula

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Both of Little Timmy's scapulae and a humerus have been exposed. Plus...we found the back of a sloth skull! And recently a coracoid from a teratorn, the largest bird found at RLB - its a giant condor with a wingspan of 12 feet!

Box 14 also has this

mysterious caliche surrounding bone

See those bluish-gray bands that surround the brown bone? That is a caliche that has never been seen at RLB before and its formation is still somewhat of a mystery...speaking of which...did anybody catch the Page Museum featured in the Travel Channel's "Mysteries at the Museum" show that aired last week?

Hey asphaltophiles,

This is old news to some of you, and of no consequence to others, BUT:

As you may or may not have noticed, I (Andie) have not been posting to this little blog. And that's because I am no longer an excavatrix! About two months ago I packed up my 18-year-old Honda and drove to the lovely twin cities of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. I am in grad school for library and information science, with a specialization in data curation! It's super duper fascinating, I promise.

Carrie, senior excavatrix extraordinaire (and maybe others) has and will continue to update the blog, time permitting. Seeing as she is fully awesome, the blog under her guidance has been (and will be!) fully awesome as well.

So please, wish me luck in the soon-to-be-frozen north as my Californian blood is frozen solid this winter and my brain is filled with way too much information about information. And best of luck to all the diggers, present and future, of La Brea: may your trowels find tapirs, and your discovery marks be few.

Cheers,
Andie

On September 21, for about 2 hours, the Page Museum was graced with 100 UCLA freshman's extra pairs of hands as part of their Volunteer Day event, in which more than 4500 freshmen are involved in city-wide community service. When we were approached by them for work we thought it to be a great opportunity to get some needed gardening, painting, and matrix bucket moving done.

Project 23 was given 30 of the volunteers and a few of their captains to help us organize our buckets by concentrating buckets from each box to one location and ordering by grid, with each specific grid bucket being counted. Since having that many people in the compound at one time is a bit terrifying they were divided into 5 groups for each deposit with each group being supervised by a staff member (Michelle, Laura, and I) or volunteer (Karin and Christina) Taking time out from supervising the new garden addition, Aisling captured our bucket moving moments.

Here Laura explains to her freshmen how exactly they will be moving buckets onto the fancy platforms that we constructed to protect bucket bottoms from rusting.

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The volunteers were very enthusiastic to help move buckets for science

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The driveway was utilized to pre-sort buckets for box 1 and 5b.

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There were a lot of buckets to move and sort! We could have used the students all day because the two hours of time was not enough. The job was finished by myself and others including Trevor, Herb, Christina, Jean, Jack, Jenna, and Justin during 2 days following. It was a lot of work but the students were super helpful in doing the majority of the moving and now gathering data about each deposit and processing matrix will be much easier.

We now have the more convenient ability to know exactly how many buckets have been produced from each box and each grid. Here's some results:

Number of buckets per completed box:
Box 5b - 541
Box 7B - 267
Box 10A - 191
Box 10B - 91

For boxes still in progress:
Box 1 - 428
Box 7a - 279
Box 14 - 71

This gives a grand total of 1868 buckets produced in the past 2 years, 1724 of which were moved that day. That is an average of 74720 pounds (37 tons) of matrix that has been excavated out of Project 23 over the past 2 years. With 19 boxes left to finish that could mean about 100 more tons of matrix left to go.

Many thanks to all of those involved!

Excavation of deposit 14 has been underway for almost 2 months now and has been very fruitful, as expected, due to what we have already seen in the amount of spill-over fossils that were put in buckets when the deposit was removed from the ground, as demonstrated here by Andie in a previous blog. But before we could poke our dental picks in the top asphaltic sugar sand already showing signs of large bone we had to transform the highly awkward box into something we could work with.

This is how it came to us, after protective tarp removed

box 14 uncovered

The actual deposit is the darker colored sediment in the center. It fell apart when they were trying to excavate it and came to us wrapped with a few boards and metal bands, then plastic, and then supported by tons of the sterile "fill" dirt within the space of the tall box.

box 14 surface

Box excavation preparation included cutting the metal bands that crossed over the top of the box, assembling scaffolding, removing front top board so the public can see us work, affixing handrails for easier boarding, setting up a shade canopy, and determining grid lines, and then box 14 was ready for digging!

box 14 scaffolding

The fossiliferous asphaltic sugar sand midsection of the deposit is relatively easy to dig in. It softly peels and crumbles away from the bone. We never have it completely easy though, as within it there are also spots of hard oxidized asphalt as well as bones that have already been fractured. Given that the deposit was disturbed upon excavation we also have not been taking three point orientation measurements of bones as they are believed to be disrupted from their original position. The only data thus far taken has been the grid and level that the fossil is found in.

Included in what we have found so far:

Box 5b is done. We started in early November, and after 8 months there is now an empty spot in front of box 14. The "June gloom" weather during the last days of 5b matched the sadness we felt in knowing that the excitement of 5b would soon be gone. We had a good time discovering its intriguing asphalt infused stratigraphy and cool fossils including:

When we last left our heroes:

where-we-are-today

They were digging away at deposit 5B. And the still are! The deposit has shrunk considerably from its original size, but excavators are still looking for more elements of Clyde, our partially articulated, partially complete Camelops hesternus.

As you may remember from two posts ago, we had most recently exposed his almost perfectly articulated 7th cervical and first thoracic vertebrae, and were pleased to find that his 6th cervical vertebra wasn't too far off:

Hey, we're on tv! Again! Video below features Dr. John Harris & Trevor Valle speaking, and Carrie Howard, Meena Madan, and Tara Thara excavating (and Aisling Farrell and myself for approx 2 seconds a piece, which is perfectly a-ok, because being on tv is scary). "Best of LA," check it out (email subscribers -- I think you'll have to click through to actual blog to view, sorry):

[埋込みオブジェクト:http://bestoflatv.com/player.swf?t=1272259422000]

Little kid questions of the week (both addressed to Carrie):

Small child: "Do you guys ever find anything besides bones in there?"
Carrie: "Like what?"
Small child: "Like weapons??"

I'm sure the kid meant spearheads, but my mind went instantly to a giant ground sloth holding a rifle.

Small child: "Why do they save all the dirt?"
Carrie: "We will look through it for microfossils."
Small child: "Microfossils... ohhhh like ancient germs??"

Now that one, I suppose, depends on what you consider a germ... We do get asphalt-eating bacteria, after all...