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Hey all! It's good to be back and writing a trip report again - I've certainly been busy this summer. As some of you may recall, my step brother and I found a basal mosasaur in September of 2021. I haven't spoken much about it publicly, but rest assured it hasn't been forgotten! Research and preparation of the specimen is reaching a fever pitch this summer, both of which I'm happy to say I'm actively involved in. The reason for the silence has been to avoid leaking details that might scoop our paper. However... This year at A&M I'm participating in a grant for science communication, and because of this I have permission to show a little more about our animal now, since it's research is the subject of my internship with SMU right now. So! What's been happening with the mosasaur since the last trip report of it (below)? Here is the very abbreviated continuation... January 2022: On a whim, I decided to return to the site - just in case we missed anything. It felt almost foolish to hope for more, considering we already had a significant amount of skull material and a few verts. I came in with no expectations. I did not take long to see more of the animal. I started working several feet away from the pit we had dug, with the idea to work inwards, but instead almost immediately found the terminal vertebrae of the tail.... in near perfect articulation Below: Four vertebrae with haemal arches locked together (several are shrouded by a white layer of paraloid b-72) Realizing what I had, I strenuously chopped a trench out around the block with three chisels and a rock hammer, then somehow lifted the entire thing and walked back the distance to my car. Here it sat below: One year later, these terminal verts were prepped. I think they are spectacular. Let's zoom back to the moment though... I realized we now had both ends of the animal - the back of the skull from September, and the end of the tail from today. Where was the middle? I called Christian (my step brother) and let him know what I found, telling him that we had to attack the site together again to see what more there could be. The following weekend we did just that, expanding our pit until eventually were were met with this sight: This was huge, and we realized we had potential for the entire animal being buried here now. I called up the researchers at SMU i had just connected with, and was instructed to glue the block back into place until a more formal excavation could carry out. Months pass. Multiple attempts at resuming the excavation professionally are made, each falling flat due to unlucky weather or last minute personal commitments. This string of bad luck continued until one day in October... October 2022 Realizing we might not reach years end with an excavation, the folks at SMU suggested I borrow some power tools for the weekend and conduct one on our own. Christian unfortunately couldn't make it, since he had just moved to Washington. Despite his absence, I constructed the best team I could think of.. @JohnJ, @LSCHNELLE, and my dad. For an entire day we happily slaved. I took absolute loads of photos and videos, to avoid the same configuration confusions the SMU folks and I have encountered already. John's experience is the stuff of folk legends, and he has performed many excavations on his own finds before, while Lee practically has Eagle Ford shale running through his veins. Their presence proved to be invaluable and I will never be able to thank them enough. It was an epic hail-mary to undertake in a single day, but we finally extracted the bulk of the animal in several large blocks. I still can't share photos of diagnostic bones, but here are some images from the day below: From left: My dad, John, and I making a trench. Below: An unusual symphyseal ptychodus tooth found while trenching: As the day neared an end, our pace picked up - we were on a serious time crunch and had to make it out of the site soon. With 30 minutes to spare, we all together lifted one of the final slabs and were met with a sight that can hardly be described with words... Lying before us was a pair of dentaries, in amazing condition apart from where the slab split them. Fortunately, the damage is not irreversible - the part and counter-part fit back together absolutely perfectly. Part and counter-part, below: The site, after the end of a long day. Four exhausted, fulfilled men walked away from here. Fast forward to this spring, were I got accepted in a science communication grant program, allowing me to take the research of this mosasaur to new levels with my mentor at SMU. By the end of the summer, we strive to have an abstract for our paper. The work is building to a breakneck pace, but I love and it's what I hoped for... until next time!

In the last three and a half months I'd say I finally had the true college experience - always tired, hungry, and getting strangled by ochem 2 . But, my last final was yesterday, so time for a long overdue trip report. I'll go consecutively, with brief notes on the sights and interests encountered along the way, culminating with a prep update on the Plesiosaur I found over the summer with @Ptychodus04 and Joe. Unfortunately, the block containing the Coniasaur from the same trip hasn't been scanned yet. I'm also twiddling my thumbs for updates August/September: At this point, I was still settling in after moving to college station, and was keen to assess the potential the area had. Being so close to Whiskey Bridge, I made 4-5 trips. Eocene stuff isn't my forte but I found an interest in it quickly. Here are some highlights: Two prongs from the primitive cuttlefish Belosaepia ungula. I was fortunate to find both of these the same day. These occasionally get nicknamed "cuttlefish beaks" due to their superficial resemblance, but are really the "horns" that tipped the posterior end of the cuttlebone. This is a vestigial character that some modern cuttlefish genera still have traces of. For those who are interested in Belosaepia, here's a link to a webpage Professor Thomas Yancey made of the animal. You might also want to read his paper on it. https://lakeneosho.org/Belosaepia/index.html Some other Eocene highlights: Pristis lathami sawfish rostral tooth. Another smaller one was found the same day as the Belosaepia specimens Exciting in situ of Galeocerdo eaglesomi Once removed: October rolled around the hunts dropped off for the most part, as now the semester was picking up. Despite this, excavations became the theme of October. The best of which was finally, after long last, exhuming the bulk of the mosasaur from last year. For those who haven't seen the trip report or updates, in September 2021 my step brother and I found a basal mosasaur at my favorite Eagle Ford site. Those weekends were used for extracting the cervical verts and back of the skull, which was initially all that was revealed. In the February that followed, I poked around, just in case there was more bone, and found the end of the tail. This led us to tackle the site again a week later, and we immediately found more than the two of us could handle. We woodglued the block back and crossed our fingers that it would outlast the weather. Thankfully, it did, and with my dad, @JohnJ and @LSCHNELLE , we retrieved what might be the rest of the skull, as well as (hopefully) a significant portion of the body locked away in some large blocks in a heinous hail mary. It was epic, and only possible due to the leadership and excavation savvy of John and Lee. Due to its research interest, I can't share photos yet, but thankfully attention on the specimen is strong and consistent now, and prep is in full swing. However! One thing I can show is a super odd Ptychodus tooth dug up by John as we trenched around the skeleton: Turns out it was pretty lucky Lee was there, he's the forums go-to Ptychodus expert and speculates that this may be P. anonymous symphyseal (none are known of yet). Ptychodus researcher Shawn Hamm said he hasn't seen something like it yet. THAT is some good bycatch! The weekend after, I joined in briefly on a Plesiosaur dig in an unusual location with @GPayton and some SMU folks. That was also exciting - but can't share photos of that either (yet!) The October paleo scene rounded out with a short hunt at an old favorite spot. Preservation and quantity weren't of their typical splendor, but I was still very happy to see these, especially in such a scenic area. First: a heartbreaker: Next, a reworked P. mortoni tooth found in Pleistocene matrix: Other highlights: Followed by a monster P. martini / P. marginalis tooth. Very river rolled, and the strata that would support both is in the area: November/December: Academically the most difficult two months I've had, so definitely needed some creek therapy Here are the results: First - a visit to my favorite comanche peak fm spot. This tiny, extremely rich site has yielded dozens of Heteraster c.f. texanus, a Tetragramma sp. that I've posted on here before, and a monster Tetragramma my step brother Christian found (which I just realized I haven't shown here before - here it is the day of, vs after prep). That was over the summer. This time, I brought some good friends to the site for a night hunt. They're my rock climbing friends who were interested in the boulders of the area, and I thought I'd introduce them to paleo as well. Our best result this time was probably this Heteraster weathering out of its little pocket. It was a cool in situ. November also found me out in my best Austin chalk site. This was the area I found a Hadrodus sp. incisor in August of 2021. At the time, I was still quite a noob, so assumed that I was in the Ozan. Rather, this site is a contact of the Austin chalk and Ozan. I'm unsure of the member of the Austin chalk here, but I don't think it's the upper most. My suspicion is Dessau. The Hadrodus situation is complex - it was found as very, very recently tumbled out of formation, so technically in float, but I'm 99% sure now it originated in the Austin chalk present, rather than the Ozan layer above. This opens up the possibility of H. marshi, known only from the holotype Othniel Charles Marsh found "somwhere" in the smoky hill chalk, the Kansas equivalent to the Austin chalk, and thus even rarer than my previous ID of H. hewletti, known from the Mooreville chalk (roughly equivalent in age to the Ozan). That said, H. priscus has an assumed range that extends this far as well. The research on the genus is sparse, so there's a lot work I get to do on my end to organize the available information and make my own determinations. Regardless, I visited the site again and it was nautiloid galore. I found 6-7 Eutrephoceras coming out of the marl-y chalk in a small area. Another find of note from this site was my first Pycnodont tooth (Hadrodus being a Pycnodont has fallen out of opinion, so this now is my first): My only other cretaceous hunt in November/December was a brief lower Eagle Ford excursion. Here are the notable results: Cretoxyrhina mantelli and Ptychodus occidentalis (the latter found in gravel) Also worth note - this pretty scene after popping out a Ptychodus tooth that's been sitting on my desk at home for some time. This one was found at the same site as the Pliosaur tooth in my albums: Thanksgiving break had me in the East Texas Miocene, hunting petrified wood of the Catahoula fm. The scenery of the land there, especially during fall, is astonishing. I will include some landscape photos in a following post in response to this. This honker piece of palm wood was my best find. One thing to note as well is the Oklahoma Permian matrix gifted to me by @historianmichael. It is astonishingly rich, full of Orthocanthus teeth. My favorite find so far is the jaw fragment below, which I should try to get ID'd soon. This matrix kept me sane on the days weeks I couldn't make it out. My final highlight is the prep progress I made this semester on the block of Plesiosaur vertebrae co-discovered with Joe and @Ptychodus04. A&M, I must admit, is quite lacking in their vert paleo realm (though it's great for inverts). Their paleo prep lab has no equipment, so, I got to work with an exacto knife and, all things considered, I think this specimen is turning out well That's it for the last few months. That said, I'm ready to take a nap and then decompress by hitting some freezing creeks, trying to find the rest of the Plesiosaur above, and romping around huge Ozan exposures for the next few weeks

This is rather interesting - an old (2013) blogpost from the PLOS Blogs about why paleontology is relevant https://blogs.plos.org/paleo/2013/02/19/why-paleontology-is-relevant/ -Christian