Our first day in the field proved to be very successful and hinted at a very productive field season. We returned to one of last year’s most “fossiliferous” sights and found many promising items including a pile of fossil-triceratops skull fragments. Walter Joyce holds what we believe to be one of the three horns of a triceratops.
We are working in the Hell Creek region, a geologic region known for its late Cretaceous fossils with a distinct iridium-enriched K-T boundary. This thin band of rock marks the end of the Mesozoic Era, and the beginning of the Cenozoic Era, and is associated with a massive extinction caused by an asteroid that struck the earth near the the coast of Yucatan, Mexico. This area is especially important to researchers examining how certain organisms responded, or in the case of dinosaurs (they went completely extinct), did not respond to such a geologic event. We are returning to this site tomorrow to explore the idea of taking out the triceratops.
Picture to come!
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