Slow Week

This week has been even slower than the last, and I don't really have any cool fossil discoveries to report in on. Despite the fairly regular rains we've been getting lately (sometime between noon and 3:00 each day it's almost guaranteed to start pouring) there just hasn't been much new and interesting material exposed. There's no doubt that the water's been helping clear out sediment for us -- it's pretty common now to arrive at a site to find our quarries full of loose debris and it's obvious that there's a lot of movement going on on the hill slopes. We've been doing more prospecting than we have in the past in hopes of finding exposed fossils away from our usual hotspots, but all we've found are bits of turtle carapace and unidentifiable bone fragments. And while it's true that the quarries have produced more fossil material than in past visits, this material has also happened to be mostly unidentifiable bits or non-diagnostic remains (limb bones with no ends, simple fish teeth, etc.). There have been a few interesting finds, like a small, worn section of camel jaw, but they're greatly overshadowed by the amount of junk we've been pulling from the outcrops. The upside to it all is that the weather during our field work window (from 7:00 until whenever the sky threatens to rain down on us) has been phenomenal. The increase in cloud cover has noticeably upped the humidity, but that's more than compensated for by the steady winds and occasional drizzles that have also started up. So even though we're finding little and less, at least we're comfortable.

With all the disappointment in the field, my week has been much more about soccer than about paleontology. I've had a ton of opportunities to play, with work games on Fridays, pickup on Wednesdays, and a park less than a block from my apartment. I'm at the point where I play in one form or another every day and still find myself wanting more. My team's prospects for the work tournament aren't looking great at this point, but who knows, maybe we'll turn it around in the second half of the season. I think that the final games are on the Friday right before I leave for home, so the timing is pretty perfect.

This week has been relatively slow -- there are still permit issues, and Jorge has had a number of meetings/conference calls, so we haven't been spending a ton of time in the field. Still, we've managed to do a bit of field work and have ended up having a pretty varied week, which I'm all for since it helps the time pass a little faster.

Mangoes from Corozal.

On Monday we went to the off-site fossil storage building in Corozal to do more sediment screen washing. This is something I've done before and basically just involves playing with mud for a few hours, so I was excited from the moment I learned we'd be going. For the past few weeks we've had bags full of rocks sitting around in the lab prep room that we brought back with us from Hodges Microsite (Cucaracha Formation, ~20 million years old) and Jorge decided it was well time we took care of them. It was a perfect day for doing it too:  bright and sunny, which would have meant hell working on the canal, but on the shaded patio of our storage building with regular spray from the hose we used and a fully air-conditioned building at our disposal, we couldn't have been more comfortable.

The screening process itself.

Of the two steps involved in screen washing, the first is by far the easier and more enjoyable. You just empty your bag of rocks into a pail, cover with water and add a scoop of detergent, and start mixing with your hands. Most of the rocks (which, from Hodges, were all sandstones) go to mush on their own or with the slightest squeeze, so the job basically boils down to going after the few resistant rocks in the group while creating a slurry out of the whole so that it will (hopefully) go through the screens easily. Really, it's like hanging out chatting with your coworkers, while you just so happen to be elbow-deep in mud. The second step, though, is where things can get frustrating. There are three layers of screens, stacked on top of one another from finest at the bottom to coarsest at the top. Just about everything passes through the coarse screen, but in layer two things tend to get clogged up and can start overflowing. It takes a lot of patience with the hose running constantly and your hands trying to push the fine grains through; for the first few minutes it almost always feels like nothing is happening at all, but once things get going it's down hill from there. The screening process takes a while, but it's all worth it because only one person can do it at a time! So when it wasn't my turn on the screens at I was free to do whatever I wanted, and it just so happened that the yard behind our building was covered in mango trees with PLENTY of ripe mangoes! While one of us worked, the rest went around from tree to tree inspecting the fruit that had fallen to the ground and boosting each other up to reach the yellow/orange/red mangoes still attached to the branches. By the end of the day we had washed six bags of sediment and collected a few dozen mangoes -- a highly successful Monday!

On Tuesday we returned to Pina, with the intent to do more exploring and prospecting than we had been in the past few visits. Somehow we ended up walking a completely new section of beach, which amazed me, considering how many times we've been there by now. And there was plenty to find on this new stretch! Right off the bat Sam spotted a thumbnail-sized shark tooth ripe for the collecting, and things just got better from there. I found this one particular sandy bank that had a rib bone, a vertebra, a piece of turtle carapace, and more shark teeth than I ever would have believed! Granted, they were cookiecutter shark teeth, each no larger accross than a pencil eraser, but the sheer quantity more than made up for how small they were. They were quite literally falling out of the sandstone to the point that i couldn't look at any given spot without seeing one or rest my hand without setting one loose. It was really cool, and yet another reason to make me love Pina! I also learned that day that sea slugs are really bad at dealing with low tide -- I found two stranded on the beach and quickly heating/drying and another that was in less than an inch of water and struggling to follow the water out. Of course, I couldn't help but to put them into some safe tidepools, but for the two that were already starting to dry out I think survival chances were pretty slim. The one that was still in the water when I found it inked at me when I picked him up, which I had no clue slugs could do, so I think he ended up just fine.

Small rib I found on the beach.

Some kind of billfish skull -- we'll be
coming back for it!

Thursday marked our return to the canal zone, and it should be permanent this time! It's too bad that "permanent" will only last for three weeks until we go home (so soon!), but what can you do. Neither Thursday or Friday were particularly exciting as far as discoveries go, although I think Nicole found a complete molar at one of the sites. There's been a fair amount of rain since we last worked near the canal, so we're hopeful that as we tour the different localities we'll happen upon some newly-exposed major discoveries.

Success at Pina

Jacketed and ready to go!

We FINALLY recovered the skull from Pina up on the Caribbean side! It's really been an ongoing saga -- I remember first finding that thing all the way back in January. You may remember (but probably don't) that we were supposed to take the thing out last Friday. Well, we got up early that day and marched over to the labs as planned, only to find that our truck had been taken in for maintenance and that the only other available truck was so far on it's last leg that we were forbidden to even try taking it to the other side of the country and loading a huge rock into it. (You may also remember that one of our trucks, which happens to be the only other good one, broke down when we were coming back from the Azuero Peninsula.) From that Friday until today, every low tide was forecast for the early morning -- as in, pre-dawn early. So, when we finally made our way to Pina today (we still had to get up at 5:00...) we had our doubts about how solid the plaster jacket on the fossil would be. Or if it would even still be there at all. We were pleasantly surprised, then, when we found the thing in near-perfect condition. The plaster was just barely on the soft side in the very center (where it had been receiving the most sea-spray), but otherwise it was as if we had just made it earlier that day.

Without delay we set to popping the rock out of the cliff face. Since we had already created a nice, deep well in the previous visits, it was just a matter of putting a few chisels around the perimeter and driving them in towards the center to fracture the last remaining connection between our boulder and the wall it had once been a part of. Two people did the chiseling while another two held a homemade tarp-stretcher underneath to help break the fall onto the hard tidal flat. Despite feeling a little crowded with all of us standing on one another's feet, it actually worked pretty well. The boulder popped out with only a few well-placed chisels and we were more-or-less able to catch it with the tarp. The thing weighed a few hundred pounds, so we had no delusions about preventing it from hitting the ground entirely and were mostly just aiming for reducing the impact, which we were able to do. The only problem (something always to worry about when removing a fossil from a cliff face rather than from flat ground) was that some of the material extended even deeper into the wall than the trench we had carved out, so we had broken the fossil. Even worse, some of our chisel strokes had caused an additional fracture maybe half an inch behind the one that separated the boulder from the cliff, leaving a sheet of fossil + rock quite ready to pop off, which would almost certainly result in further breaks. We ended up carefully removing what bone fragments we safely could and left the rest for whoever might choose to study the skull and describe it. (It was nearly impossible to tell the orientation of the skull, so we were basically in there blind and decided there was too much risk to try extracting anything else.

The enamel is the little part pointing towards my wrist,
and the rest is all root.

Our imperfect extraction actually ended up helping us identify the specimen, since a tooth was left exposed after the boulder detached from the wall. This tooth was relatively small but had an extremely large root, something characteristic of a sperm whale. It's all about small victories sometimes. And although the day wasn't a perfect success, any time spent in beautiful Pina is time well spent and I thought we did pretty well with the skull, all things considered.

Bonus: sea slug hanging out in the shallows.

Soccer Season!

I may have already mentioned this a few posts back, but in case I skipped over it: volleyball season is over. My team (CTPA-Ancon) ended up 4th overall (basically right in the middle) with one of our players getting the tournament MVP, so it definitely could have gone worse. Although I've been enjoying playing more than I ever would have thought, I consider the end of the season to be good news because it means that soccer season is here! In fact, games started last Friday, so I'm a bit late in delivering the news. Up until now, I've only been able to play a small handful of times after work and I've mostly just been practicing on my own at the park at the end of the street, so I'm stoked that I now have a place to play regularly. We play on the same blacktop parking lot as the volleyball games (which is frightening) with five to a side, including goalies (why anyone would want to play goalie on cement is beyond me). My team only has seven players, which means that I get a lot of play time -- something I know I should be thankful for when I look at the teams with at least a dozen people. There are A LOT of really good players throughout all the teams, so I totally feel in over my head, but I've always felt playing with people better than you is a great way to practice. Plus, I held my own in our first game so I know I can keep pace when it comes down to it. I don't know how good our prospects are for the tournament (we lost our first match 0-1), but I'm just excited to be playing at all. It's been too long!

Pacific-side locks

Tuesday and Wednesday of this week were spent in a new area (for me) of the canal expansion zone, where the new locks to the Pacific are currently being constructed. We were given a very short-term and site-specific permit to work in this spot, but our requests for a long-term, general permit are still unanswered. I'm 99% sure this has to do with the fact that at our usual localities the work we do is STRI- and University of Florida-specific, while at this new Pacific locks site our work will directly benefit the canal authority. We essentially did the work of the ACP geologists for them -- they had passed the site off to us because they had found a few fossiliferous beds, so why not let us just do all of the measuring and describing and hand over our data once we'd finished. We want to do whatever it takes to maintain good relations with ACP, so we take care of the occasional odd jobs they throw our way, but three months of dealing with their selective communication and permit-withholding is really starting to wear on me. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for the long-term employees like Aaron and Jorge.

The highly productive layers were where you can easily
see the slanting of the bed. Also, the mud made getting
to and from the outcrop quite a challenge!

I really shouldn't complain, though, since it gave me a chance to go to the field -- in all likelihood those chances will be few and far between from now until the end of the internship. And the work wasn't too demanding or challenging, just a bit on the dull side. Sam and Jorge measured the section, which wasn't much thicker than 25 meters, while Pedro, Nicole, and I prospected in the invertebrate-rich beds. On Tuesday I felt like a kid in a candy store; no collecting had ever been done at this site, so the best layers were just overflowing with easily-removed, well-preserved surface fossils. In the few hours I spent collecting there was hardly a continuous minute spent searching, since I was able to just go from one fossil to the next to the next. I even found a fragmented fish tooth, which was something we had really been hoping, but not expecting, to find. (I should say that not ten seconds after my find, Nicole found one that was both larger and more complete; I swear, the fossil gods must frown upon me!) Even being highly selective I was able to fill up two sample bags worth of inverts, no problem. The usual post-fieldwork ice cream bar at the nearby MiniSuper felt particularly well earned that day.

Scallop.

Wednesday was a group-wide prospecting day. Nicole and I worked mostly in one particular layer that had been highly productive the day before, while Pedro, Sam, and Jorge wandered around a bit more looking for anything new. It's a good thing they did because Pedro found a sizable (maybe 10 cm across) piece of turtle carapace that led to the discovery of even more turtle remains in the same bed. By the time the afternoon rolled around, all of us were digging bits of turtle out of that layer. They weren't the prettiest fossils I've ever seen (they were pretty heavily weathered and fragile, so they went to pieces when removed from the rock, even when prepared with glue) but they were pretty abundant so I'm sure we ended up with some good ones somewhere in there. Having explored the entire area and not having any particular interest in the kinds of things we found there, we bid the site farewell in the mid-afternoon and decided not to return for the rest of the week (the duration of our permit).

I should say a bit about the work site, since it was actually pretty cool. We don't usually work so far south when we're in the canal expansion area, so I had never seen that part of the expansion project before. Things are a lot further along there than they are in our usual spots -- instead of just demolishing and clearing and moving rubble around, they've already entered well into the phase of constructing the actual lock system. Security was extra tight so we had to be escorted each day by a safety and a security personnel  This, combined with the much heavier traffic of huge construction vehicles, really drove home just how expansive and complicated the expansion is. It felt much more like an active and frenzied construction zone than the comparatively deserted areas where we normally work. As we drove in both days, we would be adjacent and roughly at-level with the existing canal and would then descend down some 150 meters into the completely dry bottom of the soon-to-be expanded canal, a bizarre experience to say the least. And down in the bottom were the beginnings of the lock support structures -- imposing cement columns that shot straight up out of the pit. Together they formed what looked like a kind of gauntlet  almost like castle walls from which would-be attackers would be showered with arrows and hot oil. It was definitely a cool back drop to be working under.

Lab Work

Bin full of samples to-be-entered.

What, you may ask, have I been doing with all the time we've been spending in lab lately? The most time consuming task has been database entry. Everything that we collect for STRI, whether form the canal, from Pina, or from our field trip to Azuero, eventually needs to be cataloged and put into STRI's online database. It's incredibly straightforward work, but time-consuming nonetheless because there are so many different fields of information that need to be provided. What keeps me from losing my mind while entering in our hundreds and hundreds of samples is the section that requires me to list the taxonomic and morphological information of each fossil. When we're out in the field, we write general notes on the collection bags to indicate what kind of bone or tooth or whatever we've found and also what animal it came from. In the database I have to be more formal and specific, which has led me to learn a lot about the scientific names for various organisms (i.e. Turtles are from the order Testudines) as well as learn a bit about skeletal morphology (this is much more limited because Jorge usually takes care of it). It's been pretty fun and rewarding to actually get a bit of a handle on all the Latin words that I've heard thrown around since I got here.

My other main project in the labs has been general prep work. I finally finished cleaning up the fish vertebra that's been sitting on my desk for months, I've pieced together a few broken turtle bones, and cleaned up some inverts. Most of the bigger and more interesting projects get handed over to Nicole, who has more patience and care in one finger than I have in my entire person. I'm fine with it -- anything too big/important and I'll stress myself out about it to no end.

More Caribbean Breezes

It never gets old!

Once again back in my favorite field site: Playa Pina! Since we no longer have regular access to our canal localities, Pina is one of the few spots left to us where we can hope to do any relevant field work. Plus, Jorge specializes in fossil marine mammals (dolphins, whales, manatees , of which there are plenty to find, so he has a more positive attitude towards the place than Aaron ever did. As far as I'm concerned, the more trips to the Caribbean side, the better!

We took off for Pina around 10:00 AM, a bit later in the morning than usual since low tide was forecast for the middle of the afternoon. Our crossing of the Gatun Locks overlapped perfectly with a passing cargo ship, so we got to watch the whole process without having to wait for all the setup/approach/tug boat attachment, etc. It was surprising, really, just how quickly they can get such a large vessel through those things, once all the hardware is in place -- the boat was secured within the locks and being brought up to canal level within 10 or 15 minutes. When we pulled up to the Pina waterfront at around noon, the sun was shining, there was a nice breeze, the tide was giving us some space to work, and we were ready to go.
Our goal for the day was to finally remove a dolphin skull from a cliff that had been resisting us for the past few visits. We'd already carved out a nice deep trench around the thing and were confident it could be done in just a few hours. Since only so many of us can swing hammers and pickaxes at a time, two of us worked on carving out even more rock around the skull while the rest prospected and pulled out fossils from the tidal flats, including some turtle plastron and carapace and a some kind of really ugly manatee bone that to me looked completely unidentifiable and weathered to bits. Within an hour tragedy had struck hard over at the dolphin skull -- a certain blonde, six foot + someone had tried to chisel out a chunk of sandstone and ended up sending a crack straight through the fossil-containing boulder we had shaped out, halting all progress for fear of everything shattering to pieces. In all fairness though, it was probably bound to happen no matter what. The tide action is our friend in making it possible for us to break through the rock with our hand tools, but with the same hand it also weakens the matrix supporting the fossil, leaving it just as vulnerable and susceptible to breaks.

The plastered dolphin skull.

The fracture proved an opportunity for me to truly shine, for the only way to take care of a crumbling fossil is to wrap it up in a plaster jacket, something I got plenty of practice doing during my first month here! The tricky part in this particular job was that we only had plaster bandages and toilet paper. No foam or felt or saran wrap to protect the exposed bone. So rather than wrapping up the entire boulder as one normally would, I instead had to plaster around the circumference of the boulder and across the front only in those places where no bone was directly exposed, resulting in what basically looked like a half-finished job. With the equipment we had, it was the best that could be done. Frustratingly, the plaster was slow to dry due to the sea spray and the shadow provided by the cliff, and the waves were lapping at our feet before it had finished setting. We had no choice but to leave it for the next day and hope that the plaster would hold up. The bright side was that the next day we'd be able to bring a more complete set of plastering equipment, so we'd be prepared for the worst.

PCP-PIRE Pina Division

Of course, our little excavating crew (the local kids) were hanging around pretty much the whole time we were out working. Although school is back in session for them, they happened to have half a week off and were eager to use our tools, show us any sea life they were able to catch, and ask us questions about our personal lives. This time around they were particularly enthralled by our use of sunscreen and by the fact that none of us have children. There were plenty of opportunities for breaks and sitting around, since there was limited work space and lots of plaster dry time, so I spent a ton of time just hanging out with the kids having them teach me new words. At one point I pulled out my camera to take some pictures of my plaster work and they almost immediately gravitated towards it and insisted that I flip through all the hundreds of photos I've taken since I got here in January and explain what everything was. Doing so sure beat hacking at a rock wall with a pickaxe, so I was more than happy to oblige. They're some really good kids and even though I've only spent a couple of scattered days with them, I'm really going to miss seeing them when I return to the States.

The kids got a hold of my camera!

Postscript: I hurt my back overnight (how???) and when I woke up Wednesday I was without a doubt unfit for the field, so I took a lab day and watched everyone else head off towards beautiful Pina. From what they told me, they had to do the jacket all over again, though this time they had everything needed to do it properly. Again, however, there wasn't enough time between the tides for everything to set properly, so we'll be going back on Friday to finally retrieve that skull. It's causing all kinds of trouble for us!

Delays, delays, delays...

I was wrong! I thought we had finally fallen into a routine here, but I was totally off base. Turns out we've just been working on an extended temporary permit for all of March, and now we no longer have access. Here's a rough rundown of the situation: For the past four years or so, the Smithsonian and the Canal Authority have been working together through a joint contract that expired the first of this year. Under that contract, the Smithsonian received some amount of funding (I have no idea how much) for the work they were doing and would have to submit regular reports detailing what had been found and where for ACP's use in PR, historical documentation, etc. The group I'm currently working with (run through the University of Florida) knew the contract was nearing it's end and in the months leading up to 2013 repeatedly tried to get things moving with both the Smithsonian and ACP, since we're the only ones who would truly be affected by delays. Both organizations assured UF that there would be no problems at all and pushed negotiations off until the new year. Well, we're now in the fourth month of 2013 and no new contract has been agreed upon. Supposedly we can still access the Canal on a day-by-day basis (or week-by-week if we're lucky) by getting special permission the head environmental engineer, but we haven't been able to reach her for the past two weeks. So until that changes, lab days and spontaneous field trips are forecast for the foreseeable future. I'm not terribly upset about this because I've taken responsibility for cataloging all of our samples on an online database and up until now have basically had no spare time to actually do so!