My 10 days as a Sooner Part 2

[Tompaleo@aol.com]

As promised, the second and last installment of my experiences this trip. For 
me the real fun of the entire trip (as it is for any trip to any museum) is 
to review the collections.  This hallowed area is finally unpacked and 
organized in such a way that all the lower K material from both the Cedar Mt. 
Fm., Antlers Fm., and the Cloverly Fm. were all grouped together which sped 
up things a bit. They have also started an 'Arundel' cabinet with casts from 
some of the more important of my finds. Perhaps by the time I am done and 
pass the mantle, it will be full! At any rate, the Smithsonian has and will 
get all the originals!
Originally, I had brought some oddities from my Arundel work down to 
hopefully find comparable material. Unfortunately, I did not fare well with 
elucidating these "oddities" except for one or two items. In the first 
instance, one of these oddities may turn out to be _amphibian_ which would be 
another Arundel Clay first. the second item in question seems most likely a 
sauropod tooth- a minuscule, if not juvenile one if so! 
Naturally, as it is my main interest, I spent much time tracking down all the 
theropod teeth and skeletal material they had under _Acrocanthosaurus_ and 
_Deinonychus_ in preparing for my updated work. On the former, despite the 
absence of "Fran," there is a fair amount of material from the Antlers. 
Included among these are a pair of metatarsals, part of the femur, tibia(e), 
a phalanx, gastralia, part if the ischia and pubes and a number of dorsal and 
caudal verts. Just using the available material gives one a fairly accurate 
impression of the size of this guy! 
 There was not much _Deinonychus_ material there other than teeth so after 
sketching and or photographing most of what I wanted (oh yes, my good 35 mm 
camera with macro lens died on me!) I spent the next day checking out other 
specimens of interest. For instance, the cervical vertebra of the type of 
_Sauroposeidon_ were there. Actually, I had seen them a few years back when 
they were at the old museum and at that time it was considered a 
pleurocoelid. Those verts are huge and with massive cervical ribs too! There 
were two jackets of verts, some 4-5 feet long each and each jacket held about 
4 vertebrae each. If I remember correctly, the entire recovered cervical 
series was about 9 feet long. Sadly, that was all that site (the Prison) 
yielded of the beast. Having visited this site I was struck by how much the 
strata reminded me of the Potomac Group here in Maryland. The weird thing is 
they find their material in a tan, poorly cemented sand whereas Potomac Group 
sands typically are fossil depauperate! Only the Arundel clay "consistently" 
yields vertebrate fossils and this is only valid south of Baltimore for the 
most part. But I digress. Unfortunately, there was no way to get a good shot 
at the material as they were wedged under the bottom shelf of the large rack 
so I don't have photos of them from _this_ trip. But I do however, have a 
couple reference shots from my first trip in 1996 and will try and dig them 
up for the edification of the assembled mind (DML). Another tidbit of note is 
that the famous tenontosaur comes from this same general area as does much of 
the Acrocanthosaur material. Again this is in stark contrast to Arundel 
remains which are very disarticulated and scattered. Of course, there were 
loads of examples of Early K "sheep," viz a viz _Tenontosaurus_, in every 
ontogenetic stage one could imagine. And representatives from both Cloverly 
and Antlers Formations. 
Finally, I also happened upon two other items which I cannot comment upon yet 
but something should be coming out in the near future on one of them. All I 
will say about one of these is WAY COOL! 
This pretty much rounds out my interest in the megafaunal specimens, 
naturally there is a plethora of microvertebrate material that would have 
taken weeks to thoroughly go through, by which time I would have been 
permanently cross-eyed! Fascinating material and a cursory perusal gave me 
some ideas of what to expect or to look for such as the aforementioned 
amphibians as well as lizards, birds, etc.
So now my batteries are charged up and ready to hit the outcrops. That is if 
this cold and wet spring ever warms up and dries out enough to prospect!

One more thing. On a large cart in the collections room was a large 
assortment of material I and others helped to collect last summer when we 
spent a week up at Hell Creek and Bug Creek. Another excellent place to 
visit, especially when you have guys like Bill Clemens, Don Lofgren and Jack 
Horner (who was unearthing his latest T. rex recently discussed on the list) 
up there! It also reminded me that I was supposed to do a story for y'all 
about that. We even got the nickel tour of the K-T boundary sites often used 
in numerous papers led by none other than Bill Clemens. Come to think of it 
that the entire two weeks were well spent prospecting sites ranging in age 
from the Late Jurassic in Wyoming to the early K in S. central Montana to the 
K-T boundary in NE MT- a span of about 100 My of the Mesozoic!
But I need to review my notes before I get into that trip!

Hope this was of some use! Thanks to those of you out there who have already 
given me some positive feedback.

Cheers,
Tom

Thomas R. Lipka
Paleontological/Geological Studies
Tompaleo@aol.com