August 6, 2006 - Evidence of Additional Skulls Discovered Options

[Jason_Petula]

Ask most people to dig a massive hole in the side of a mountain and they would probably tell you to get lost. Add to the job description the chance of finding dinosaur bones and the backbreaking labor becomes more interesting. Today was a flurry of activity – and I’m not talking about the World Record I set for excavating a hill side on the North Slope.

The neat thing about excavating a dinosaur quarry is you never know what to expect. Today we planned on jacketing the previous day’s discoveries and hauling them up to the top of the bluff. Unfortunately (I say this jokingly), the bone density at this site is amazing. Each member of the team is working on a different section of the quarry and new discoveries are constantly made.

Today we found evidence of three additional pachyrhinosaurs in the quarry. How do we know this? By one bone that is the tell tale sign of a skull, the occipital condyle. This mushroom-shaped bone is found at the back of the skull where it connects to the vertebral column. The specimens we found today all measured 8.0 cm in diameter which is indicative of a juvenile pachyrhinosaur. Each specimen was jacketed and tomorrow we hope to drag some of the jackets to the top of the bluff.


The bone of the left is an occipital condyle, which is a skull bone of a pachyrhinosaur.