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Last fall after working a museum, I returned to a ranch in the Pierre Shale south of Rapid City. One of the students I'd brought with me earlier in the spring of 2016 spotted a chunk of fossil that we originally identified as wood, before we realized that it was a large squid pen! So, right before our classes started we got back together and spent a few days camping on the ranch to excavate it to donate to the museum as well as some other fossil. All kinds of things got in the way, our car broke down, we were driven out of our tents by a thunderstorm, and if it weren't for GPS we would have lost the location of the pen. The site was on a steep, soft hill of shale on the edge of a ravine with a half dozen cattle skeletons from a blizzard back in the nineties. But we got the squid out of the hill and into the museum! Almost a meter long, seems to be the middle of the rachis with a few fragments of the vane

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First picture is from the day after we finished the pedestal. We had fill dirt and a tarp over it for the night, but the pedestal did a good job of deflecting the moisture and the pen itself was dry. 

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The pen prepped out and ready for storage at their museum. It was the largest cretaceous squid that the museum had, but a few weeks ago the forestry service gave them one that was dimensionally larger but from a smaller animal. Oh well, that's the way she goes

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Some more miscellaneous fossil we found, a few articulated mosasaur vert and an icthyodectes dentary

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