More Lab, New Work

So far things are shaping up to be another lab-heavy week. We thought we had made a breakthrough over the weekend when Aaron received word that we'd been granted a temporary access permit to a dam site within the canal expansion area. But, of course, things could never be so easy and straightforward. One of the conditions of the permit is that we need to be escorted (at least for the first few visits) by a government health and safety officer. However, the contact information for said officer leads to no one - both calls and emails go unanswered and unreturned. Aaron's trying to figure out our other options, but for now it's a dead end.

The bright side is that I was given a new project to work on! Since my microfossil picking setup is still out of commission  I was given a new piece of sandstone, this time containing a large fish vertebra. The sandstone is fairly soft, especially when wet, so the contrast between it and the fossil is stark (great for someone like me who lives in constant fear of breaking the specimens). Two days' work has yielded a good amount of exposure on the bone, and I think that by the end of tomorrow it'll be all but extracted. I can't really say why, but for some reason working on bone has been much more engrossing and entertaining than working on shells. The time passes pretty quickly and I don't feel like a zombie by the end of the day. Hopefully there will be plenty more material like this for me to work on.

River dolphin. Weird, right?

My progress pales in comparison to what Nicole (another intern) has accomplished in the past few weeks. Because of her prep experience, she's been working on the enormous "dugong" ribs we have down in the basement and has freed a ton of bone material. Enough so, in fact, for Aaron to discover that the bones don't belong to a dugong at all - they're from a river dolphin! And so began my instruction in fossil identification. The evidence lies in the vertebrae in the neck. Most marine mammals have simplified necks with only two main vertebrae (others very reduced) that are basically only used as attachment points for neck tensing muscles (for bracing when diving into water, etc.) and allow up-and-down movement. River dolphins, on the other hand, can turn their necks both side-to-side and in a rotational sense and this shows up in the nature of the joints between neck vertebrae. It actually looks almost unnatural when you see of a picture of one turning to look at a camera. So now I know my first fact about river dolphins! Hope I kept all of that straight...

The final bit of exciting news is that the wooded area behind our labs has been a regular animal preserve lately. I've had numerous sightings of iguanas, dart frogs, countless bird varieties, and monkeys! I looked up a Panama monkey guide and discovered that what I've been seeing so far are Panamanian night monkeys and Geoffroy's tamarins. Both unbelievably cute. I'm going to start making an attempt at bird identification, but there are so many different varieties that I think I'll get overwhelmed pretty quickly. We'll see!