Alberta Fieldwork 2015

This week we are heading out to the field again! Back out to the Alberta site from last year.
All our gear is ready....

Our ATV is ready.....

Are the fossils ready for us? It's time for some science!

Miscellaneous Photos

We had so much fun, not all the photos could fit into every post.... so here are the misfits!

Horseshoe Canyon

Oh Noes, he's coming through the grocery store!!

He he he...

We were playing with water.... definitely playing with water!

A selfie :)

Pottery imitates fossil!

So much to carry!

Drumheller is way too much fun!

By our powers combined!

Wow, what an awesome trip! We excavated a ton of great fossils and some have some excellent material to work with in the coming years!

Thanks to the fabulous research team from Virginia Tech and UT Austin that made it all happen! Here we are, dirty, sweaty.... but pretty happy!

Burning stuff

It is really nice to have a ranch house to come back to.... And it is great fun to burn things while hanging out with the other researchers at the ranch!

Our Last Day

It is always sad to leave a great field site! Even though you are tired and ready for a break and a real bed, the leaving is always bittersweet!

The morning looked lovely but there was a threatening rainstorm that chased us but never got us thankfully!

It looks like we were never here!

Oh shale.... you are a pain to work with!

So crumbly!

Still.... the views are great!

Even my dad had to admit the material looked pretty nice! Thanks for hauling all our gear around!

Coring for a good geochemical record

In addition to looking for fossils at this field site, we are also trying to assess the environment of deposition and the environmental conditions that these organisms lived in. To do this, the UT Austin team has joined forces with Dr. Ben Gill's team from Virginia Tech. The have brought out a portable coring drill. It is pretty awesome!

Ben and the students prep for core hole #1

This rig, the Shaw Tool,  is built around a weed-wacker motor and fits in a backpack... very cool indeed!

The hole is very small, but we still did our best to hide it!

Beautiful (and secret) field sites

Our field sites are absolutely stunning, but, for scientific and legal reasons the exact locations need to be kept a secret. This poses some interesting challenges for the blog, so please bear with me if you are frustrated at the lack of detail.... and please, if you recognize a site, keep it "hush-hush" :)

They sure are lovely though!