Saturday 6th June - Richmond

Saturday 6^th June

On Saturday we went back to the fossil dig site and we found lots more phalanges. But we found a hexagon phalange, vertebra and some ribs because we were there all day. We also found the head and the snout and the snout had a tooth in it. (A skull is extremely rare to find.) We also got to put plaster on the skull.

This is the fossil.

This is caleb mixing the plaster.

This is me mixing the plaster.

This is the fossil in the plaster.

Mum's note:
We decided to give the fossil digging one last go today before we move on from Richmond to Townsville. We thought it might be really nice to find the head - a bit of a hopeful thought given that most of the fossils that we found so far are not well preserved, they were not articulated (positioned together anatomically correctly) and the council grader had clearly already dug up some of the skeleton..... However, gloves in hand today, we were hoping that the large number of phalanges that we found yesterday might indicate that we had found the front flippers rather than the back.

Phalanges still in the rock before excavation.

We moved quite a bit more rock and found a number more phalanges before we realised that a mess of bone that we'd found earlier might be a very degraded skull without the snout. We could just see where an eye socket may have been.

In the middle of this picture there is a spherical depression. Looks like an eye socket.... (also contained a small fragment of the bone found inside an ichthyosaur's eye). So now, where's the snout?!

Further inspection revealed that another mess of bone nearby was the broken-off snout, pointing straight into the ground. At this point, Dr. Tim was interested in taking another look and decided to preserve the snout remains for a more official excavation.

Could that be the snout?

Dione removing dirt from around the possible snout.

Yup, pretty sure that we've found the snout and its headed straight down.... time to ring the real palaeontologist!

Dr. Tim showing us how its done.

Caleb playing Professor Flint's dinosaur songs on Dad's phone for Dr. Tim.

Further excavations on the buried ichthyosaur snout. Right at the base of the photo we discovered a tooth still in the jaw.
Apparently, the teeth usually fall out of the jaw soon after death and are often fossilised separately.
This is the point where Dr. Tim decided that perhaps we should try to formally retrieve some of the find, despite its less than ideal state of preservation.

This was when the fun really began! First we laid down wet newspaper over the fossil site.

We mixed up some plaster. Then we soaked one of Paul's t-shirts in plaster and laid it over the newspaper.

Finally after the plaster had set a little we covered it over with dirt and placed a barrier around the site. There is a dig team coming to Richmond in a few weeks, and hopefully they will be able to remove the snout then.

Installing bunting.

Covering up the ichthyosaur.