Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'heavy jacket'.
-
So we ventured out this last Saturday and had a bit of luck. We chanced upon a poor bit of bone protruding from an unusual deposit and went to uncover more of it to see the extent of which it went into the soil. After a time, it started to look like an upside-down Diprotodontid jaw: So we finished up the property and went to get a late lunch; we decided we would come back to put it in a plaster jacket. I later decided it would get too cold and dark for me to be of much help (I can barely yield "Maximus"-our giant pick-and am quite out of my element in the dark), but @Ash and a friend of ours decided to head back around 3:30 p.m. (Brisbane time) to at least get it pedestalled and plastered. They left the jacket to dry during the night after having finished at about 7-7:30. The following morning, Ash and I headed back out with a sturdy garden fork to dig under the jacket and flip it over. I had had the idea of taking a wheelbarrow down to carry it back to the vehicle (which was a ways away because we couldn't drive directly to the site due to the terrain) the night prior, but we had forgotten it, so Ash was dreading carrying it (I'm only about 110 pounds, and this jacket weighed much more than I, so I was not going to be of much help in hauling it back...I resorted to carrying the fork back and paving the easiest trail back to the vehicle for Ash). Anyways...we did manage to get under it and flip it over, which was a relief. The jacket had worked. Then we both hoped-if it was a jaw indeed-that it had teeth! But our first task was getting it back to the vehicle, so we made many stops along the way until we could leave it at a place we could go get the vehicle and drive back to: We got back to the house, rested a bit, and then started on prep. This was a BIG jacket: And it would prove to be an unusual prep. We had never come across such a mix of soils. Clay, white rock, charcoal-like clay, and black nodules with orange inside them. Finally, we found...a tooth! We grew excited. All the work for the plaster jacket was worth it if the jaw had teeth, and it seemed it did. But as time wore on, our excitement was quelled by the difficulty of determining what was bone...and what wasn't. And what was bone was so soft! And...deformed? We started finding more teeth (a beautiful black-blue), but they weren't arranged appropriately: And as always, so many cracks! But when we started towards the back of the jaw(s), we started to realize things were getting really "wonky"...what were we to make of this? Where was the bone going (obviously not where it should be)? After sending a few pics to the QLD Museum curator to see what he thought, we decided to call it a night last night. So far as we can discern (with the help of Scott, the curator), we think it is Diprotodon, but it's unusually small and has odd preservation. Time will tell us more, hopefully, so we'll keep this page updated. Right now we are waiting for it to dry so we can apply paraloid to help stabilize it. We just tried to remove as much clay as possible so that when it does dry, it doesn't crack the fossil further. Here's a 15 cm ruler for scale where we stopped:
- 38 replies
-
- 3
-
- australia
- diprotodon
-
(and 1 more)
Tagged with: