Paleo Lab 2/2/2017 - Oh Snap (Sara)

Sara 

Be brave reader! The following is a harrowing tale of life in the Paleo Lab! 

Today's blog post truly started off last week in the Lab where I narrowly avoided catastrophe.

 It was just the average afternoon in the lab, and Jodie and I had been cleaning matrix away like crazy. I had worked on the neural canal of my vertebra and had removed a sizable chunk of sandstone. It had taken a while, as the sandstone matrix closest to the bones tends to be harder than the matrix further away.  

As we clean up the lab each shift, we sweep away any debris, pack away our scribes and air hoses and tuck in our chairs. Then we have been moving the table, which is on wheels, closer to the neighboring jacketed fossils.

 As the table rolled into position, my hand caught the large portion of the centrum you see below. 

--> CAUGHT IT. <--    I stopped breathing....

There is nothing like working in a Paleo Lab. Nothing can quite describe the joy of working to remove a fossil from matrix which has surrounded it for millennia. Knowing that you are the first human being to lay eyes on the surface of your fossil. My Paleo Lab life flashed before my eyes. Rick is going to kill me. I broke his dinosaur.

 By the time our week had revolved and I returned to the lab things were in a different state.

Rick, rather than revoke my pathetically short paleo-preparologist status, was actually pleased that I had caught the plummeting fossil- rather than have someone brush past it by accident and have the whole thing shatter on the hard concrete floor.

He had spent four hours of his own time carefully fitting the pieces of my precious sauropod vertebra back together. I saw this upon entering the lab and almost burst into tears with relief.

Rick is a master. He's amazing. He should be showered in all the accolades I can think up and then some more awesome ones which we could undoubtedly make up out of thin air. 

My nerves are still a little fragile. I'm sure to get over it but for now I've put in a few hours working the mass above my original vertebra. Far far away from the vert with the attitude! (Images Below)