Week two at the Natural History Museum marks the beginning of field work. This week I will be outside digging for bones (and other fossils) in the heat. To begin the week of sweat and slow work, I signed up to be part of the dig in Saltville, VA.
This particular site is an Ice Age site, full of fun creatures from mastodons to mammoths with a particular emphasis this summer on bear teeth. The Saltville site is situated off of a walking path in the middle of the small town.
The site is one of the oldest in America and even Thomas Jefferson had ties to the Saltville site. For approximately three weeks every summer the Gray Fossil Site team (made up mostly of graduate students) treks the hour and a half to dig in the mud. It is a mud pit that has to be drained out every morning before the digging can begin.
I arrived around 8:00 am to the site and the pump was already hard at work. The four other people on the dig were two graduate students, one recently named “official” paleontologist, and a software engineer that has a knack for digs. I was the only one with zero experience so they gave me a crash course in how to effectively dig for hours. Which is what we proceeded to do for the rest of the day, five people working in a mud pit slowly chipping away at the site. After three and a half hours of work one of the graduate students found the first and only find of the day- a tooth. The lead paleontologist, who was not there today, is the one who received funding for the project and has decided that our focus is bear teeth so that he can being to experiment with DNA testing. The work was slow and very detail oriented and I do not see this for the rest of my future but I am excited to see if there is more to be found at the Gray Fossil Site.