Our first Hell Creek fieldwork trip is in the books, and boy did we find some neat specimens! Recently Mike Triebold and I set out for South Dakota to check in with our landowners and scout for new fossils eroding out of the Hell Creek Formation. You never know what might be hiding out in the badlands, heck in 2022 I even found a Tyrannosaurus rex that I named "Valerie".
 |
| Mike Triebold at work in the field |
We spent the first few days finding some small specimens and I even located a site that may produce a small disarticulated Triceratops skull, but the rocks were being unusually stingy with fossils. We kept pushing on though, sometimes for 22,000 steps a day if my Fitbit can be believed, because you never know what might be hiding around the next corner.
 |
| Part of a Triceratops jugal with the distinctive bone texture below the eye socket |
One morning I met up with a crew from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science who were based in nearby North Dakota this summer. There's a lot of federal land in these parts, however there's no way to access some of these outcrops legally without getting permissions to cross the private lands that typically surround them. Nobody likes trespassers. When a museum wants to visit some of these landlocked outcrops, I work with them and the surrounding landowners to make sure everyone can cross safely and in a way that doesn't interfere with the ranching activities or destroy their property. It works well and keeps science happening!
 |
| Edmontosaurus annectens hoof from a microsite |
The Denver crew wanted to collect some rock samples on various parts of an outcrop, and I was also showing them some microsites that I had found in previous years. I check them yearly becauseyou never know what little thing might be exposed at the surface of a microsite after each year's rains (and what might be destroyed by erosion if left for another winter) and plenty of croc, dinosaur and mammal fossils were found. After breaking for lunch, I was contacted by Mike to FIND HIM NOW. I made sure the Denver crew was safe and set for departure and then went to meet the boss.
 |
| Sometimes great looking outcrops are disappointing |
Mike drives me out to a low outcrop on the side by side. Coming out of the outcrop are croc osteoderms (or Crocsteoderms as I mutter to myself in the 120+ degree heat). These bones, embedded in the skin of the living crocodilians, are super common in the Hell Creek. What's uncommon about this site was the osteoderms were ARTICULATED: together as in life. I've never seen that in the wild before.
 |
| Sites that you can drive right up to are rare |
I documented the site and Mike started digging. We scraped ironstone concretion pebbles off the surface, collected any fragments, then started excavating the rock around the exposed bones. It became immediately clear that the skeleton of this crocodilian was there and almost complete.
 |
| The croc: skull near my toe, the "panhandle" is the tail |
We excavated the specimen much like we do Kansas fossils, where we find the maximum extent of the specimen, jacket the whole area, and worry about the small delicate things that are in the rock back in the lab where we aren't roasting in the sun and getting eaten alive by bugs. The sandstone matrix was fairly hard and difficult to work with, but the jacket split free and flipped very well.
 |
| Mike with the flipped jacket |
And what a specimen we think this will be. The entire skeleton looks to be about 3 1/2 feet long, or a little over a meter. From what I could see of the shape of the skull, it looks similar to Stangerochampsa, a croc that we at TPI helped to restore a few years back. Stick with us this year as we get to preparing this jacket hopefully exposing the best example of tiny Hell Creek crocodilian found so far!
 |
| Stangerochampsa replica made by Triebold Paleontology Inc. |
