2006-09-18 Wood pallets holding big dinosaur bones in various stages of preparation

Excavation vacation
A week hunting for dinosaur bones in the Badlands is like going on a scientific treasure hunt.

I'll never look at a beef rib or a museum dinosaur display the same way again.
That's just one of the things I took away from a week of hunting for dinosaurs and digging out ancient bones in the Badlands of North Dakota.

My 15-year-old daughter and I were there participating in digs sponsored by the Marmarth Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization funded and run by volunteers and led by Tyler Lyson, a sort of paleontology prodigy

Tyler Lyson, one of the founders of the Marmarth Research Foundation, examines a site where fragments of triceratops horns were found on teh surface of a hill.

The 23-year-old grew up in the tiny town of Marmarth, N.D., attending the modern equivalent of a one-room schoolhouse and hunting for fossils on his family's sprawling ranchlands. Even as a kid, Lyson's discoveries in the region's dinosaur-rich Hell Creek Formation earned the attention and respect of scientists.
"He's had professionals looking at what he's collected since eighth grade," said Lou Tremblay, one of the Marmarth Research Foundation volunteer staffers. "He's only 23 years old, and he's already published several papers."

Lyson started the foundation three years ago with Doug Hanks, an Apple Valley resident who used to work with the Science Museum of Minnesota leading high school students on dinosaur digs in the Marmarth area.

For two months every summer, about a dozen volunteers sign up for weeklong stints at the foundation. They work under the direction of expert diggers to prospect for dinosaurs, dig out their bones and work in a lab to prepare them for research or display.

The program attracts everyone from school kids to experienced amateur paleontologists. Lyson, who is now pursuing a doctorate in paleontology at Yale, said his volunteers have included a Broadway producer from New York, a retired CIA agent and an Australian who stayed for five weeks.

Tremblay is a retired high school earth sciences teacher from Connecticut and a veteran of dinosaur digs in Argentina, China and Montana. He has recruited many of the volunteers to the Marmarth program.

"It's kind of boggling now, how this project started from nothing, and within four years, it's become a major entity," Tremblay said.

SCIENCE DUDE RANCH

Volunteers sleep in an old railroad bunkhouse run by the town's historical society. They get their meals at the local cafe. The experience is a little like being on a dude ranch for fossil hunters, except you're doing real science.

My daughter and I volunteered in August, during the last week of what had been a big season for the research foundation.

On our first day, we made the 10-hour drive from the Twin Cities in time to have dinner at the cafe with Lyson, Tremblay and Tom Tucker, another foundation staffer.

One other volunteer had signed up for the week: Ken Burnes, who had driven all the way from Cape Cod, Mass.

We ate baked chicken breasts while the others tried to explain why they like to dig for old bones.

"That's a good question, because it's hard work," Burnes said.

"Many, many days can be days of sheer drudgery," admitted Tremblay.

But the reward is the occasional thrill of discovery.

"That's exciting. You're finding something no one knows what it is, what it belongs to," Tremblay said. "It's the first time in 65 million years that it's seen the light of day."

"It's like a treasure hunt for a lot of people," Lyson said. "You get to see something you've never seen before."

After dinner, we hit our bunks in the bunkhouse and listened to the roar of passing trains that no longer stop in Marmarth.

About 2,000 people lived in the town during the 1920s. Now, there are just over 100, Lyson said. Some parts of the place feel a little like a ghost town, with boarded-up buildings dating back to the railroad days.

Eventually, Lyson hopes to set up a new building that will serve as both a research center and a dinosaur display space.

That night, we also heard the sound of the first rain the region had received in weeks. The next morning, we got breakfast at the cafe at 6:30, but the mud was too slippery to go into the field.

Instead, we walked to the foundation's lab, which is housed in the garage of a house in town. It was purchased by a supporter of the foundation and rented to the organization as a base for the staffers.

'THE TURTLE MAN'

The garage was full of worktables, tools and shelves and wood pallets holding big dinosaur bones in various stages of preparation. There was a stingray jaw, a tibia from a triceratops, T-rex bones and the impression of the skin of a dinosaur on a big chunk of rock. Dozens of turtle shells were carefully labeled and stored.

Lyson is well on the way to becoming the authority on fossil turtles in the country, Tremblay said. "He is the turtle man."

Tremblay showed off a big, pristine turtle skull he found on a dig. "That skull will be used for Tyler's research. So, that's exciting for me to make a scientific contribution."

Then, Tremblay put us to work preparing bones, first giving us instructions on how to use an air scribe, a vibrating needlelike tool driven by compressed air.

The segments of triceratops ribs Tremblay gave us still were partially encased in the dirt they were buried in. We used the buzzing air scribe like a miniature jackhammer, scrubbing away soil, rock and plant roots to reveal the bone.

My daughter also learned how to use an air abrader, a sort of miniature sand blaster, to clean a chunk from a triceratops frill, the bony extension at the back of the creature's skull.

Often, the bones are in fragments, requiring jigsaw-puzzle skills and Super Glue to put a piece together.

When you're done, you're left holding something both familiar and strange. Dinosaur bones that are found on the surface of the ground are bleached white, like a cattle skull. But those dug out of the soil are a deep coffee brown.

They're not like rocks. They're smooth and surprisingly light. You can often tell this is a creature's a rib or a vertebra, and you find yourself thinking of beef ribs, except bigger.

All bones have an aesthetic beauty, but there's an extra kick knowing this rib was used by one of Earth's most extraordinary creatures millions of years ago. And it's not inside a museum display case. You're holding it in your hand, and you just brought it back to life. Neat.

Some volunteers like that experience so much they spend their whole week working in the lab. And veteran workers like Tucker, a retired teacher from Illinois, will take home bones to work on over the winter.

INTO THE FIELD

The afternoon was dry enough for us to get into the field, so we piled into a pickup truck and bumped over jeep tracks before hiking over a site where Lyson spotted some crocodile teeth and vertebrae.

"He's very, very good at prospecting," Tremblay said. "He sees bones that you would walk by."

At another site that had been discovered by previous volunteers, we spread out over a gully cut into a hillside and gathered up pieces of triceratops bones scattered on the surface. Lyson pieced together parts of two brow horns from the animal. It's a promising site. There could be a skull six inches below the soil, Lyson said. "We'll find out next year."

Lyson points out a dark band of soil in the side of a mesa on the horizon. That's the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, the sediment left from a meteorite crash believed to have led to the mass extinction of species on Earth. The Hell Creek Formation that we're exploring lies within the Cretaceous layers, the last age of the dinosaurs.

The last stop of the day was called the turtle graveyard, a hillside Lyson discovered when he was in sixth grade. He has been working on it ever since.

He suspects it was once the site of an oxbow lake that periodically dried up, killing the turtle population. He and the rest of the foundation volunteers have removed about half the hillside, first with jackhammers and then with X-Acto knives. They've found about 65 turtles.

We spent some time carving into the hill with our little blades but didn't find any turtles. You don't think you can dig very far with a razor blade, but we ended up having to haul away wheelbarrows of dirt.

"There's sort of a lot of tedium," Burnes said. "What else do you call it? But it's worth it if you find a bone."

LONELY, BEAUTIFUL

The next day, we drove out to a triceratops site near the Montana border, passing by cattle, deer and antelope grazing on the ranchland Lyson's relatives own. It's lonely but beautiful country.

We hiked over some steep terrain, smelling the scent of the sagebrush and keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes, until we reached a hillside with some triceratops bones partially excavated.

Our job was to finish getting the exposed bones out and get the site closed down for the season. The work involved hours, kneeling or sitting on the ground, stabbing at the dirt and rock with awls, slowly gouging out the material surrounding the bones.

It was a warm day, but not as hot as earlier in the summer, when the bone diggers toiled in triple-digit temperatures, and the soles of eight pairs of volunteers' boots came unglued in the heat.

We occasionally uncovered a small chunk of long-buried amber, which led to a discussion of how the "Jurassic Park" movie got it all wrong. There was a lot of hauling five-gallon buckets full of chunks of clay and brushing with whisk-brooms. It was dusty and repetitive.

But then, there's that moment when your awl turns over a chunk of dried clay and there's a bone underneath, or when your X-Acto knife scrapes over the textured surface of a turtle shell.

You stop as the bone gets mapped and labeled, and one of the staff members figures out how to stabilize the piece and makes plans to extract it.

BUILDING A JACKET

We learned how build a jacket, a protective cast made from aluminum foil and strips of burlap soaked in a plaster solution, that you build around a bone still imbedded in the dirt. The jacket holds the bone and the surrounding dirt together when you pry it all out of the ground.

The dirt, plaster and bone can add up to a lot of weight. And someone has to hump it over the trail to get it back to the lab. The stuff we worked on was light enough to carry. But some jackets the foundation has excavated weigh thousands of pounds, requiring heavy machinery and the construction of a rudimentary road to get them out of the field.

We ended fieldwork each day in time to get back to town and dinner at 5:30. That's followed by an optional lab work session in the evening. You head back out in the field every morning about 7:15.

In the field, you might have to do day-laborer grunt work, moving dirt with a shovel and a pick. Then, back in the lab, you have to use jeweler-like delicacy cleaning bones with dental probes and toothbrushes.

But you need a lot of patience in either case. The bones were in the dirt for millions of years. It takes a lot of care to find them, get them out and put them back together.

"When you get to Marmarth, you get to do the whole process," Hanks said.

Rainfall on our last day canceled a final prospecting session. There was a spectacular double rainbow over the Badlands, but as we walked through town, my daughter and I found ourselves looking down.

"I keep seeing stuff on the ground, wondering if it's a bone," Robin said.

"I know what you mean," I said after deciding a discarded cigarette butt I had spotted wasn't part of a dinosaur.

Richard Chin can be reached at rchin@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5560.

If you go

Next season's dig at the Marmarth Research Foundation will start June 23 and is scheduled to last seven weeks. A week costs $850 and includes meals, lodging, transportation to dig sites, equipment and supplies. For more information, see www.marmarthresearchfound. org or www.pinkyweb. com/tremblay.