Fossil Friday - dinosaur jacket

IMG_2535.JPGThe fossil prep lab at Western Science Center is abuzz these days (literally, when the air scribes are blasting away). WSC staff and volunteers are working their way through the half-ton of fossils we brought back to the museum last summer from the Upper Cretaceous Menefee Formation of New Mexico.Much of our recent prep effort has focused on the hadrosaur skeleton I posted about back in September and October. We're now moving on to some of the smaller items we brought back.One of the new sites we documented and collected during the 2018 field season is a scatter of at least half a dozen dinosaur bones, discovered by WSC volunteer John DeLeon. Although the bones are highly weathered, we collected them all and got them safely back to the museum. Given their close association at the field site and the absence of any other fossil organisms, these bones probably all belong to the same individual dinosaur. John opened up the largest plaster jacket from the site yesterday. There is a little knob of bone exposed to the left in the image; the rest of the bone is underneath the fossilized tree branch to the right. We don't know what type of dinosaur is represented by these bones, but hopefully the answer will emerge as John continues his work.This specimen and all the Menefee fossils were collected by staff and volunteers from the Western Science Center, Zuni Dinosaur Institute for Geosciences, and Southwest Paleontological Society.Post by Curator Dr. Andrew McDonald