Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Wednesday, Aug. 24. I’m Corinne Purtill, a science and medicine reporter here at The Times.
Last month I woke up in a tent pitched on a rocky outcrop with a sweeping view of the Colorado Plateau. I got dressed: long-sleeved T-shirt, sturdy boots, pants caked with the previous day’s dust. My sunscreen tube boasted that its plastic cap would turn from white to blue if UV rays were detected. Though the temperatures weren’t yet in the triple digits — that would happen soon after breakfast — the cap was already the color of a Dodgers hat.
Journalists often focus on the end product of scientists’ work: the conclusion of years-long study, the remarkable technology that emerges from countless failed attempts. Sometimes, we get the privilege of watching that work as it happens. That’s what brought me to southeastern Utah, trailing a team of paleontologistsfrom the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County as they took on the sweaty, dusty, heavy task of unearthing prehistory.
[Read “Bones, sweat and years: What it takes to dig up a dinosaur,” in The Times.]
The team was in the Bitter Creek area of Utah’s San Juan County to collect the fossilized remains of a stegosaurus, the plate-backed, spiky-tailed herbivore. The Natural History Museum already has a stegosaurus skeleton on display in its Dinosaur Hall, posed alongside the remains of its real-life predator allosaurus. (Those plant eaters could hold their own: Paleontologists have found allosaurus femurs with puncture wounds the exact width of a stegosaur tail spike.)
These fossils were bound for a different part of the building. Behind the scenes, the 109-year-old Natural History Museum is also a laboratory and archive where researchers from around the world study specimens collected on scientific expeditions like this one. Every fossil unearthed helps science piece together the story of life on this planet.
Thanks to new technology, scientists have learned more about dinosaurs in the last 20 years than they have in the previous two centuries. With today’s tools, “we can really bring these animals back to life,” said Paul Byrne, a USC doctoral candidate and the museum’s Dinosaur Institute graduate student in residence, as he readied a set of chisels. But “the digging part is very much the same as it has been for 150 years.”
Dinosaur digs are the slowest, dustiest, most labor-intensive unboxings you can imagine. At the start of the 24-day expedition, the team hauled power tools, generators and air compressors up the half-mile trail to the quarry, along with bucket after bucket of chisels, brushes and dental scrapers. Jackhammering away a layer of younger rock is a two-person job: one to operate the tool, and another to watch the bit to ensure no priceless fossils are nearby.
“People have been really misled by ‘Jurassic Park,’” said paleontologist Luis Chiappe, director of the museum’s Dinosaur Institute. “The idea that, ‘Oh, now you’re brushing this dinosaur with your little brush and it’s all perfectly complete’ — that is fiction.”
Fossil collecting is hard work. It’s also what makes institutions like the Natural History Museum an important resource for ongoing discovery. For those who do this job on behalf of future generations of scientists, there’s something exhilarating, even addicting, about finding these links to the past.
“The element of discovery, that’s a lot of fun,” said Erika Durazo, a senior preparator, as she relaxed in a camping chair at the end of a long workday under a sky filled with stars. “That’s always exciting — being the first eyes to uncover things.”
The team is back in California now, having brought back to the state two stegosaurus plates, one femur, one tibia, one toe bone and several vertebra, all carefully swathed in protective plaster. There are more bones waiting to be found, but those will have to wait for the team’s return next summer.
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