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Bison site: trip 4


KimTexan

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I have been planning to go out to the bison site today to see if I could find any pieces of bison in the collapsed material from the bank.

I got ready and loaded my car. When I opened the garage to leave I realized there was a steady rain. I can handle a steady rain, but not when it is in the 30upops. High 40s is kind of my limit. I closed the garage and went back inside. The forecast the day before hadn’t mentioned rain. I looked up the weather. It said the rain would diminish to 20% at 2:00.  I determined I’d go then.

 

I got on the road and halfway there it broke out into a fairly heavy rain again. I decided to continue on.

This is a view of the area. The bison site is in the creek beyond the tree line.

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When I got there it was in the mid 30s with a slight drizzle. Needless to say I’ve had better conditions for fossil hunting. I got my boots on and grabbed my gear and headed out.

 

As I rounded the corner to where I’d get on the trail I saw a coyote come trotting out of the forest into the clearing in front of me. He saw me and ran off some distance. I stopped in my tracks. I wanted to enjoy the moment and watch him. I pulled out my phone to snap a pic. He stopped on top of a grassy hill and watched me for a bit. Sorry, he was too far away to get a sharp, clear pic. There is some utility pipe in the pic.

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I love seeing wildlife. Since this site is actually in the city limits there is actually more wildlife than I’d expect to see. There is quite a bit of undeveloped land in the area though.

 

This is the area of the bison site. It’s a beautiful shady spot with the water running over rocks. So you get the delightful sound of creek water flowing.68F52F29-C361-4E41-9ADE-90BC07B308C2.jpeg.f433ecbea77bacd448f853be52b85a05.jpeg

 

I put down my gear and determined where I was going to start. I bought the screen I built, but J was pretty sure it would not work well with the dirt being wet. It didn’t. So I just determined I was going to dig.

 

I was there for about 2.5 hours or so. I found 3 pieces to my bison. The first was a lumbar vertebrae transverse process. I think I have the vertebrae that it belongs to. Here it is after I uncovered it.

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The next was the patella. I was sitting in the same spot as when I found the piece above, which happened to be right below where the femur was. I looked up and saw something in the bank. I forgot to take a pic. It was actually right where it should have been.

 

This is the femur. The Tibia is to the left of it, perpendicular to it. With the way they are oriented I assumed the patella had been lost, but it was deeper in the bank there where the two bones met.

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I worked there a bit longer with no success. So I moved to the left when I came across this. To the left of my very muddy chisel you can see a hint of red. It’s a phalange or phalanx. I haven’t looked at it to determine which.

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I worked a bit bit longer with no success. My arms were tired. Because the dirt was wet almost every swing or every other swing of my tool I had to stop and remove the clump stuck to it.

 

I decided to walk down the creek a bit. I had planned to walk to the high bank and look for fish fossils, but my socks kept slipping off my foot. It was very annoying. So o decided to not walk down the creek that far.

 I found a piece of turtle bone a piece of turtle bone almost exactly where the horse bone had been.

 

I am falling asleep trying to type this trip report. I’ll post pics of them cleaned up tomorrow and finish my story.

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Oh nothing much to see here fellas. Only 4 pieces for the whole nearly 3 hours I was there.

This is the turtle piece. I know the shell pattern and shape of the pieces can be very diagnostic. I looked in the turtle database, but was not able to find a match. One came close, but then I realized it’s reagion was quite far away in another part of Texas. The only varieties I couldn’t rule out were soft shell turtles. This creek doesn’t seem like it would be a soft shell turtle environment.

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There wasn’t much to finish up on the story. I had walked up the creek a short ways and found the turtle piece.

I am not sure why, but at that point the cold began to hit me hard. Maybe because my hands weren’t busy swinging and giggling. My fingers got the chill and began to really  hurt. It came on suddenly. My hands had been perfectly fine before that. I wasn’t wearing insulated gloves. I just had a knit glove on, then a leather garden glove over that. The temperature had dropped to  35°F. Maybe the 2° was the tipping point.

 

I use to work in a blood bank lab before my current job. It was a high level of blood banking where all the area hospitals would send us their problem cases to solve antibody issues and identify the antibodies. One of the common types of problems was in older patients, 50+ usually. The issue was called “cold agglutinin antibodies.” Patient’s would need a transfusion of blood, but when the blood bank attempted to do the screen, panel and crossmatch everything would come up position. The cold agglutinins would cause aggregate to form in the blood. If someone has these they may be very sensitive to the cold. In particular their hands and feet hurt when they get cold. The cold sensitivity causes considerable pain. So it is a legitimate issue. I’m not sure what the issues are beyond that. As long as you don’t expose your hands or feet for prolonged periods and your core temperature is normal it shouldn’t increase a person’s risk for strokes or heart attacks, because the aggregates dissolve at normal body temps. That’s one reason you have so many senior citizens move to warmer places like Florida or Arizona.

Anyway, either I have cold agglutinins or I have damaged my hands somehow at work to make them quite sensitive to the cold. We have -80°C freezers at work for storage of many of our reagents and patient samples and I frequently remove stuff from those freezers without anything more than latex gloves. I use to do it without latex gloves, but I’d get freezer burn on my skin. And if that isn’t bad enough we also use to have stuff frozen in liquid nitrogen, which is -195°C. I’d pull the rack out of the tank and then remove the box or cartridge from the rack with my hands sometimes. Anyway, I may have made my hands overly sensitive to the cold by doing that.

 

Anyway, when the cold hit me and I couldn’t shake it off or warm up my hands I was done. With the drizzle my hair was wet as was my jacket. I wasn’t soaking wet, just damp. So it was harder to shake the cold.

 

I packed my bag. I couldn’t get the zipper up. My hands weren’t working well to get it zipped up. So I left it mostly unzipped. Then I headed out. My boots were very muddy. My pants were fairly muddy too. I had bought a large trash bag to lay on the ground with a garden kneeling pad to sit on so I wasn’t sitting or kneeling in the mud. But my pants were still covered in mud.

 

It was about 5:00 when I left. It was one of those rare times I was out of the creek before dusk or sunset.

 

 

My bison bones.

 

This is the patella. It’s got a little chunk out of the bottom left. This is the same patella where the femur medial condyle has bite marks and teeth impressions on it. The missing piece on the patella may be from that attack.

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I think this is a phalanx or a phalange. I haven’t taken the time to figure out which.

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Another shot of them together. I hadn’t changed out of my dirty clothes when I took the pic. I had mud all over my pants.

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Then there is the fragment of the lumbar vertebra transverse process I found.

This is it cleaned up.D153D59B-C0C5-4AF8-A493-54C204042CDC.thumb.jpeg.23e48a2adcee451b11c63e7062e3c749.jpeg

 

It does indeed fit perfectly on one of the lumbar vertebra. Yay! It was the first vertebra I picked up and the first break I matched it up to. 

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One last thing for humor.

My bison is not house trained. He peed all over my leather recliner!

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I thought I had slung out all the water after rinsing it off. I sat down to take pics and then put it down next to me. It leaked all over my chair.

Thank goodness it isn’t a live bison. The mess he would make!

 

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"The issue was called “cold agglutinin antibodies.” 

 

Sorry to hear about that! I know it is a very limiting factor and one of the prime reasons why I am in New Mexico. My first symptom was Raynaud's and blood tests showed I had red blood cell clumping, not to mention always feeling tired and weak.  

 

While I am not a fan of the super hot days here I've had far more productive days in NM in one year than I've had in the prior 5 before moving here. Keep warm and keep digging!

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3 minutes ago, Kato said:

"The issue was called “cold agglutinin antibodies.” 

 

Sorry to hear about that! I know it is a very limiting factor and one of the prime reasons why I am in New Mexico. My first symptom was Raynaud's and blood tests showed I had red blood cell clumping, not to mention always feeling tired and weak.  

 

While I am not a fan of the super hot days here I've had far more productive days in NM in one year than I've had in the prior 5 before moving here. Keep warm and keep digging!

I’m sorry to hear about it for you. I was out there for almost 3 hours until it hit me so it wasn’t terribly limiting to me. Texas doesn’t hang out in the 30s very often.

 

The bison is kind of cramping my style a bit. I’m thrilled to have found it, but I’ve spent so much time on it I am missing out on hunting the Cretaceous during the cooler months. It gets too hot come June to do much hunting.

I’m getting ammonite fever. I haven’t found one in maybe 6 weeks. I’m vacillating between staying home and getting stuff done that I need to and going to explore some new territory over in Hurst for ammonites. I’m feeling a bit on the lazy side where I may get nothing done. 

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1 minute ago, KimTexan said:

I’m sorry to hear about it for you. I was out there for almost 3 hours until it hit me so it wasn’t terribly limiting to me. Texas doesn’t hang out in the 30s very often.

 

The bison is kind of cramping my style a bit. I’m thrilled to have found it, but I’ve spent so much time on it I am missing out on hunting the Cretaceous during the cooler months. It gets too hot come June to do much hunting.

I’m getting ammonite fever. I haven’t found one in maybe 6 weeks. I’m vacillating between staying home and getting stuff done that I need to and going to explore some new territory over in Hurst for ammonites. I’m feeling a bit on the lazy side where I may get nothing done. 

It's easy to get sidetracked but a good learning experience for you. Myself...I accidentally found permineralized material in a formation where none had been reported in prior university research. Like a rabid dog I fixated on that and managed to spend the better part of a month finding an additional 20 specimen sites. 

 

Like you, there were other things I wanted to be looking for, but I could not let it go.  Maybe you have enough to call it quits for now...box things up and work on it during the summer? I'm guessing, unless there is massive flooding, that soil bank will be there next winter.

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Speaking of getting distracted.

I do get so easily distracted. While out yesterday at the bison site I picked up a piece of brick red sandstone. I’ve seen it in the creek and it’s always peeked my curiosity. It is something I have never seen before, but I am certain it is native and washing out of the Eagle Ford most likely. Parts of the Eagle Ford are brick red, but I’ve never seen the red sandstone. Another member of the Eagle Ford has sandstone type material that is tan.

Anyway, the brick red stuff is filled with little black specks. I can never see anything overt in them, but black specks are usually phosphatic in these parts. And phosphatic hear means Cretaceous marine environment and marine fossils.

So I picked the small piece up and brought it home yesterday despite not seeing anything in it. 

I just looked at it in my dissecting microscope. All those black specks are microscopic fish bits! There are even teeth in there. One you can see with the naked eye and it looks a bit like an Encodus tooth. Most everything is 1-2 mm or smaller. Very cool though. Now I feel compelled to go in search of the source of this material and start collecting more of it.

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Hi Kim...Your phalanx is a proximal phalanx.  It is one of 8 proximal phalanxes in the skeleton of a bison.  Two per each limb.  There are also medial phalanxes.  Eight as well.  Medial phalanxes occur between the proximal and ungual or distal phalanxes (also known as hoof cores in a bison!) Do you have all the medial phalanxes?  Love that patella, too.  So, keep yourself a list of bones you have, and ones that are missing, and keep going back to recover the ones that still likely are in the bank. You're doing an amazing job of rescuing that critter for posterity.  Keep up the good work, and don't get too sidetracked with ammonites!   (Oh, BTW, your turtle shell fragment is from a Pseudemys or Trachemys, cooter or slider, and part of the plastron).    

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For anatomical uses, it is "phalanx" (singular) and "phalanges" (plural).  Not "phalanxes" which is used for ancient Greek military formations or other large groups of people or things.

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http://pristis.wix.com/the-demijohn-page

 

What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

---Shakespeare, The Tempest

 

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3 hours ago, 5 Humper said:

Hi Kim...Your phalanx is a proximal phalanx.  It is one of 8 proximal phalanxes in the skeleton of a bison.  Two per each limb.  There are also medial phalanxes.  Eight as well.  Medial phalanxes occur between the proximal and ungual or distal phalanxes (also known as hoof cores in a bison!) Do you have all the medial phalanxes?  Love that patella, too.  So, keep yourself a list of bones you have, and ones that are missing, and keep going back to recover the ones that still likely are in the bank. You're doing an amazing job of rescuing that critter for posterity.  Keep up the good work, and don't get too sidetracked with ammonites!   (Oh, BTW, your turtle shell fragment is from a Pseudemys or Trachemys, cooter or slider, and part of the plastron).    

I am missing quite a few of the feet and small lower bones. I’m missing 1 tibia and 1 metatarsal. Otherwise I have all the large leg bones.

I’m still missing a few vertebrae too. 

For the turtle I posted it on the TexasTurtles.org Facebook group and the head curator for the amphibian and reptile research center at UT Arlington invited me to come by and he would ID it for me and compare it to examples in their collection. Hopefully I can swing by there on Friday.

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On 2/12/2019 at 9:53 PM, Harry Pristis said:

For anatomical uses, it is "phalanx" (singular) and "phalanges" (plural).  Not "phalanxes" which is used for ancient Greek military formations or other large groups of people or things.

Singular:  phalanx.  Plural:  phalanxes.  Singular: phalange.  Plural: Phalanges.  The origin of the word phalanx/phalanxes is as Harry states.  It historically referred to a closely ranked unit of people, usually on the field of battle.  What most of us learned in school to refer to finger/toe bones was one "phalange" and two or more "phalanges."  But based on some recent definition searches for the singular/plural of "phalanx(es)," it appears that "phalanx(es)" is now interchangeable with "phalange(s)," in reference to finger/toe bones.  But apparently not vice versa.  That is, one would not call a unit of soldiers a "phalange."  Language can evolve faster than species!  Maybe this is a questions for the NPR radio show:  "A way with words?"

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14 hours ago, 5 Humper said:

Singular:  phalanx.  Plural:  phalanxes.  Singular: phalange.  Plural: Phalanges.  The origin of the word phalanx/phalanxes is as Harry states.  It historically referred to a closely ranked unit of people, usually on the field of battle.  What most of us learned in school to refer to finger/toe bones was one "phalange" and two or more "phalanges."  But based on some recent definition searches for the singular/plural of "phalanx(es)," it appears that "phalanx(es)" is now interchangeable with "phalange(s)," in reference to finger/toe bones.  But apparently not vice versa.  That is, one would not call a unit of soldiers a "phalange."  Language can evolve faster than species!  Maybe this is a questions for the NPR radio show:  "A way with words?"

 

I can't speak for your schooling, but there are numerous Google hits which will help you currently.  The anatomical singular and plural are "phalanx" and "phalanges."

http://pristis.wix.com/the-demijohn-page

 

What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

---Shakespeare, The Tempest

 

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Cool finds/images/updates Kim...I like that idea mentioned above about keeping a list of bones and then figuring out how much of the critter you have. 

Continued hunting success!

Regards, Chris 

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7 hours ago, Harry Pristis said:

I can't speak for your schooling, but there are numerous Google hits which will help you currently.

Thank you, but numerous google hits, along with my schooling, were what led to the formation of my above stated opinion.  Anyone interested in this topic can perform their own searches to reach their own opinions, and I hope they will. 

 

And WOW, Kim, that is great about a positive ID of Bison antiquus from an expert in local vertebrate paleontology!  Congratulations!   

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