Day 5: The Bones That Break Easiest

ConditionsSunny and mild

VisitorsA school group

Biggest blockLonger than a person

A bone that survived more than 200 million years in the rock can be lost in a second. Long thin bones are the worst. One careless move snaps them. They are exactly what the second site keeps finding.

After 4 days of digging to reach it, the team is now working inside the layer they came for, a greenish band near the top of the hill. The rock is brittle and will not be hurried. Each fragile find is cut free in a small block, wrapped in plaster and lifted out whole.

Gray green rock surface with pinkish patches, a red handled brush, a dental pick and a white wash bottle lying on it — The team works the greenish fossil layer at the second site with a brush and a wash bottle. Photo: Filippo Bertozzo

And the layer is giving. The team has found vertebrae and ribs, one of them from a placodont. There are long bones no one can yet name, and there is a complete fish. The fish material is more complete than last year’s, says Victor Carvalho, and it may help identify the species the team found last season.

Team members sitting under a white tarp on a greenish rock slope, with wooded hills behind — A tarp shades the dig at the second site. Photo: Filippo Bertozzo

Higher in the hills, Miguel Marx found bones from another age entirely. In the limestone sits a cave deposit packed with the bones of small mammals and other vertebrates. They do not even look fossilized. Miguel suspects they are Holocene, perhaps a couple of thousand years old. By this dig’s standards, that is yesterday.

A hand holding a lump of red rock studded with small white bone fragments — Miguel’s cave deposit in the limestone is full of small bones, perhaps a few thousand years old. Photo: Miguel Marx

A thin reddish fossil bone in gray green rock, next to a steel dental pick — Miguel’s cave deposit in the limestone is full of small bones, perhaps a few thousand years old. Photo: Miguel Marx

At the first site, the excavator came back armed. Around lunchtime it was fitted with a hydraulic hammer, built to break out even bigger blocks. One of them is longer than Klara Gerken is tall, and she lay down on it to prove it. The hammer freed about 4 more blocks, and the team kept undercutting the fossil layer. The excavator returns tomorrow for the last of them.

A team member lying flat on top of a large pale block of rock, with other blocks and team members around it — Klara Gerken lies on one of the new blocks for scale. It is longer than she is. Photo: Ricardo Araújo

The rest of the team kept chiseling away the rock above the layer, to see how much fossil each block holds. The answer keeps getting more interesting, Klara says, in the fossils and in what the rock records about how they were buried. The first site did no plastering that day, and the blocks are piling up. Tomorrow the team has to speed up and choose which blocks to keep.

The day also brought visitors. A group from a local school started in the village square with João Neves, learning what paleontologists do and where geology meets biology. They saw the tools of the trade and fossils from the collection of the Sociedade de História Natural: bivalves, echinoderms, ammonites. Then they walked up to the dig to watch the real thing.

A large group of smiling students and teachers in high visibility vests posing on a hillside under olive trees — Students visit the dig with João Neves. Photo: Victor Carvalho

Lars Finskud, Dave Finnegan and David Isserman arrived on site too. And Ricardo Araújo, still in his high visibility vest, gave a live talk by Zoom from a folding table in the team’s van, for The Explorers Club’s Dispatches from the Field series: “In the Field with the Triassic: The First Dinosaurs, Mammals, and the Tangled Origins of Warm-Bloodedness.”

A man in a high visibility vest talking to a laptop at a small table inside a camper van — Ricardo Araújo gives a live talk from the team’s van. Photo: David Isserman

12 smiling team members gathered on a dirt track in front of a scrubby hillside in evening light — Part of the team together on day 5. Photo: Dave Finnegan

Tomorrow the first site lifts its last blocks. At the second site, Victor wants a jaw. The layer has not said no.