Stories from the Snyder Quarry
12:43 pm
Part One: An Introduction and Overview
Composite photo of Fieldwork at the Snyder Quarry, 8/1/2007
From left to right: Justin Spielmann, the big block, Larry Rinehart, Curt Haakenson, Robert Hubbard.
Last week I was lucky enough to spend five days out in the field, as part of a team from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science collecting fossils from the stunningly prolific Snyder Quarry near Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico. The Snyder Quarry is an amazing site that preserves the remains of phytosaurs, aetosaurs, early dinosaurs, and other assorted Late Triassic animals that appear to have perished in a wildfire sometime between 210 and 212 million years ago. The NMMNHS has made several excavations at the Quarry since it was first discovered in 1998, but its dense layer of exquisitely preserved, shiny black fossils holds promise for many seasons of fieldwork to come.
Base Camp (the Quarry is just off to the left of the picture)
Early last Monday morning, I met with Senior Preparator Larry Rinehart (who organized this outing), Geoscience Collections Manager Justin Spielmann, Volunteer Preparator Dee Wilke and her husband Rich (who, as camp cook, kept us fat and happy the whole time). We headed north out of Albuquerque towards Abiquiu. Two-and-a-half hours later we arrived at the site, set up camp, and took a short walk up to the Quarry. New Mexico’s summer monsoon rains had washed a layer of brown sludge over the site, and we set to work clearing it away—an activity, it was noted, that resembled nothing so much as mining chocolate mousse.
Composite photo showing Justin Spielmann clearing mud from the Snyder Quarry, 7/30/2007
By early that afternoon, we had cleared out the mud and set up dams and channels to divert future rains (which, thankfully, did not come while we were working). Following that, we set to the main tasks at hand: reinforcing the plaster jacket around a large (5.5 x 3 foot) fossil block that was left behind during an excavation earlier this year, and quarrying fossils from the area surrounding the block.
Digging up fossils at the Snyder Quarry was a very satisfying experience. The siltstone surrounding the fossils was light grey and soft and fairly easy to pick away from the harder, blackish fossils, which were plentiful enough to find without too much effort. But there were a couple of challenges for a novice bonepicker like myself to overcome. First, the fossil layer contains not only blackish fossils, but blackish charcoal and blackish mineral stains as well. These sent me on a few wild goose chases into the rock before I learned how to discern the difference.
Second, while the fossil bones at the Snyder Quarry are generally disarticulated (that is, disconnected from the adjoining bones in its original owner’s skeleton), they are so abundant that it was difficult to isolate one fossil without running into at least three more. This was not exactly a horrible state of affairs—after all, we were hoping to collect as many meaningful bits of bone as we could. But it did quickly increase the size of several of the blocks that we ended up jacketing to bring home. For example, I began chasing the rock away from a lovely little metatarsal less than 2 inches long and after running into an ulna, a vertebral centrum, and a handful of less identifiable bits, we ended up jacketing a block nearly 2 feet square. It became very easy to see how the last crew ended up with a massive, one-ton jacket.
Stay tuned for the next installment: Bring ‘em Back Intact.
Oh, the memories. Ain’t digging bones fun?
[...] Coelophysis remains…so naturally, I neglected to snap a shot of it! We later visited Snyder Quarry and began prospecting, which resulted in a few isolated [...]