Dinosaurs, lasers and portable x-rays!

Excitement is mounting....a few days from now, and it's South Dakota bound!

This field season, we get to use a top of the range Leica LiDAR unit (a C10 laser scanner)....it even comes with it's very own, branded, rain jacket! I love this kit. It's the attention to detail that Leica does with all its equipment that makes it so damn functional in the field. The new LiDAR unit will allow us to spatially map in 3D and in glorious colour, the whole of our field site to sub-millimeter resolution. Woof! This means that any samples we collect, which will mostly be rock and sediment this year, can then be later placed into a 3D framework. This literally provides a 3D virtual field map of our entire site, so we can re-visit the location again and again, but from the comfort of our office... where there are fewer mosquitoes, snakes and less sunburn.

We are also testing a portable x-ray fluorescence unit in the field for the first time. This wonderful piece of technology provides us with valuable elemental data from in-situ sediment samples, as well as information on our beloved fossils. The sensitivity of the unit allows us the luxury of pre-screening the elemental inventory of fossils....before we have to drag them all the way to Stanford (SSRL) to be scanned at the Synchrotron. This will hopefully save us both time and research money (which is always scarce!). The great thing about the unit...it looks like a large hair-dryer....so, we will look quite mad to anyone who comes across us, in the middle of no-where, styling the dirt of an outcrop!

We have also just gotten our supply of USGS 1:24,000 maps that cover the new field site. I love maps...precious things that are works of art in their own right. I have just spent the last few hours pouring over the maps and checking boundaries, access, etc. Nothing can be left to chance. The downside of my beautiful maps...by the end of the field season, they will be torn, tattered, scribbled upon and throughly used...but, totally invaluable.

As with last year, I will endeavor to write something every day about our fun and games in the field. Stay-tuned over the next few weeks to share the highs, lows, frustrations, excitement and hard work that is fieldwork with dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous.

Chicken Curry, dinosaurs & Chemistry?

It was a standard busy day at the University of Manchester, combined with a swift lunch-time shuttle to the Royal Northern College of Music. Finding decent places to eat at the University is a constant quest for many academics at Manchester, thankfully there are many places from the Buisnes School to Geography were the trail for cuisine often ends in food. However, this particular day had chicken curry on the menu in the Music School, so the usual gathering of geologists from the School of Earth, Atmospheric & Environmental Sciences (SEAES) were loading their lunch trays with the said British favourite...fish and chips has long been knocked-off as the top favourite for some time by curry. At that time I was quite new to the said department, having just been appointed between the Manchester Museum (University of Manchester) and the SEAES. I sat at a table with one of our planetary scientists (Prof. Jamie Gilmour), an environmental geochemist (Prof. Dave Polya) and an inorganic geochemist (Prof. Roy Wogelius)...it was the latter who has since provided me a paradigm shift in my understandings of the preservation of dinosaurian beasties from days gone by.

Dr Roy Wogelius (foreground), Dr Peter Morris (left to Roy)
and Tyler Lyson (right)

As we sat inhaling our food, as time was short for lunch, I threw into conversation that I had just started working on a 'mummified' dinosaur. To have both the words 'mummy' and 'dinosaur' in a single sentence made all three look up and, albeit for a brief second, appear almost interested in palaeontology. I was getting used to the dry wit and humour of the three, so I waited for the barrage of quips on fossils not being what they used to be, or that the Late Cretaceous embalmers chasing dinosaurs and sticking natorn (Egyptian embalming salts!) where the sun would no longer shine! Dave Polya did not let me down on this front as he sat pondering the mechanics of inserting large quantities of salts up dinosaur rear-ends...However, Roy was sat opposite me and stopped eating, 'Do you want to know find out how the skin of your dinosaur got persevered?', Roy's question was one I had much pondered since seeing the bizarre preservation of Tyler Lyson's amazing find. 'I can help you Phil, if you can get me some samples'...this was the start of my journey into inorganic and organic geochemistry.

Fossil 'skin' from the 65 million year old dinosaur from
the Hell Creek Formation (North Dakota, USA)

I realised quite quickly that Roy had a healthy disrespect for palaeontology (or more precisely many palaeontologists)... something to do with an early college experience and a dance involving ping pong bats and an extinct group of arthropods called eurypterids. Having worked on eurypterids for my masters degree...I quickly change the subject when this experience is raised in conversation. This had clearly harmed Roy in some deep way. However, lucky for me Roy had spent the ensuing years becoming a leading geochemist. His realm of x-ray defraction, synchrotrons and infrared spectroscopy, was about to open-up the invisible sides of the electro-magnetic spectrum for me...a realm that would soon include the analysis of one dinosaurs particularly tough hide from late Cretaceous North Dakota. Since the 'Chicken Curry' moment in 2006, Roy has helped open Pandora's taphonomic box...taphonomy literally meaning 'burial-laws'..a science that we are beginning to play a small part in translating fossils into the processes that lay behind their preservation.