Day 2: A Drill, Then Rain, With the Layer Almost Reached

ConditionsMild morning, rain and hail in the afternoon

Day 2 opened mild over the Algarve interior. At the second site, where the rock had fought the team through the whole of the first afternoon, they went back up the slope with a generator and a drill.

The drill did in a morning what the first day could not. By midday it had taken the team almost down to the layer they expect to hold fossils.

Then the rain came in over the hills and stopped the dig at the second site for the day.

At the first site, the excavator spent the day lifting large blocks out of the layer that opened on day 1, the one that appears to hold fossils of marine reptiles and possibly fish. 4 of the 9 people there, among them Miguel Marx and Ricardo Araújo, hauled each block aside by hand to keep the machine’s path clear. Around 3 in the afternoon a storm of rain and hail sent the team into the vans for about 20 minutes.

Low sun over the scrub and rolling hills of the Algarve interior at the end of day 2 — Evening light over the hills at the end of day 2. Photo: Ricardo Araújo

The rock will not mind. Rivers and lakes on a single supercontinent laid these beds down in the Late Triassic, about 230 million years ago, when early relatives of mammals and the first dinosaurs were appearing. Somewhere in those beds is the layer the second team wants, and after 2 days they are almost on it.

Members of the DinoDawn team with notebooks at the foot of a cut of grey and white banded rock in the Algarve hills — The team reads the grey and white bands at the foot of a cut. Photo: Ricardo Araújo

The team has also built a 3D model of the cut from overlapping photographs. It covers about 46 by 43 meters of hillside with 17 meters of height from the floor to the crest, and it records the face as it stands today.

The 3D model of the cut. The grey and white bands in the middle are the ones in the photo above. Model: the field team

A second group prospected the slopes nearby, walking the outcrops for bone. Tomorrow the team at the second site goes back up with the drill and tries to reach the layer.

Bruno Camilo, wearing a magnifying visor, turns over a piece of reddish rock while sitting on a hillside — Bruno Camilo studies a rock from the slopes. Photo: Kirill Trifonov

Prospecting the slopes kept several of us busy today. Tomorrow the dig team goes back up, and I expect we will be in the layer by evening. Then the real work starts.
Bruno Camilo, field team