Thursday, April 25, 2002
I'm so very, very tired I'm not certain that I'm up to this tonight. But at least it's a good sort of tired. I did send myself out into the field today, after all, at about 7 a.m., and only got back to Birmingham about 10 p.m. this evening. The exposures I'm working are about a 2-3 hr. drive southwest of here, and on the way down I read "The Case of the Blue Carbuncle" by Doyle. The first half of the day was spent in the frustration of surveying and recording new exposures, around a little place (it's hardly a town) called Epes. Long red dirt roads, flocks of turkey vultures, and barbed-wire fences. And the day was much, much hotter than I'd expected. After several hours of surveying, all I had to show for my troubles (and sweat) was a small fish vertebra and a fairly decent mosasaur tooth, a few new spots where I could observe how the lower Demopolis Chalk grades upwards into the Bluffport Marl, and a mild case of heat exhaustion. Oh, and Mr. Moo Moo, who I'll tell you about tomorrow. Jennifer and I took a break in Livingston about 3 p.m. to rehydrate and recover from the heat (my field thermometer registered 95F about 2:30), and then we headed south, to an area near the Tombigbee River between Coatopa and Belmont, to what is probably, currently, my favorite fossil locality.
Set about a mile back from any paved roads, near a hunting trail, is a large series of deep gullies exposing the contact between the Demopolis and Bluffport, and the lowermost Bluffport beds here are packed with bone. First, we had to finish up the excavation of a large sea turtle I found here in November. In life, turtles are fabulously sturdy and symmetrical things; after about 75 million years, they tend to lose both those qualities. This one is currently in many hundreds of pieces. If the shell's ever reconstructed, it should be about three feet in length. We spent the rest of the time surface collecting, mostly shark and mosasaur teeth.
This locality is not without its drawbacks. Good localities rarely are. The most common macrofossils here are tens of thousands of giant oyster shells, some a foot across, piled up in vast reefs or shoals. As the soft marly clay and chalk weather away, the shells pile up in razor sharp mounds, and to get to the bones and teeth, one has to pick carefully over them. Even with gloves and knees pads, it's quite painful and days at the site always end with raw palms and knees, and usually a good number of cuts and bruises. Add to this the heat and fire ants (both already bad in April), nettles, biting flies and sweat bees, and the inevitable mosquitoes, and you can see why my "days off" are, in many respects, much harder work than my work days. But it was a beautiful morning and afternoon, a gorgeous sunset, and my only real regret in that this isn't how I spend every day.
We took a bunch of photos today and I'll have Jennifer post some of them here tommorow (I'm much to tired to bother with uploading and ftp and such), so come back by and have a look.
Note from Jennifer: Here's a picture of the utterly fossil-free pastureland of yesterday morning
By contrast, here's the fossil-rich wasteland that is Caitlin's favorite locality.
And here are some of the lovely knife-edged oysters
And finally, here's CRK in her natural habitat.
You can see how the oysters managed to destroy my shoes, peeling the soles off both, so that I had to tie them together with kite twine (my field pack has everything, for every eventuality). This wouldn't have happened, but my good hiking boots are somewhere in storage, still packed because of the Atlanta fiasco, and I wore a cheap pair of shoddily-made work shoes. It made for an amusing hike back to the van.
Note from Jennifer: It looked pretty amusing, too. See for yourself.
Let's see. I got the cover slick for the trade paperback reprinting of Silk today, and it look's very nice. Tomorrow, it's back to work on Chapter Five!
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