bone picking and soaking the seds

[frank bliss <frank@blissnet.com>]

Sorry about the first message, I cut and pasted a small section of text 
and the html filter kicked in hard.

Thanks to those who responded to my query.

I screened a bucket of the really hard Hell Creek material I had 
soaking (for a week) in just water today and found 3 sting ray teeth 
and several very small sharp teeth (probably fish) with just a cursory 
look.  Out come the reading glasses tomorrow.  This sediment has a lot 
of very small things that are easily overlooked in the field and I 
think that I will bring back a five gallon bucket of tailings each trip 
and see what turns up.  Water alone as an agent of dissolution has a 
lot to be desired.

After doing a web search for Quat O, I found this source below for a 
substitute.  (Now that it was brought up to me, I remember using Quat O 
back in graduate school back in the early 80's.)

A product called Quaternary O, a highly active but low sudsing 
detergent, was widely used for many years (e.g., Snyder et al., 1983). 
Although it is no longer available, a product called Miramine is a 
suitable and inexpensive substitute. It is available from the Miranol 
Chemical Company, 68 Culver Road, Dayton, NJ 08810.   I have not called 
the company listed below yet to verify availability. Another good 
suggestion was mixing H202 to a 3 percent concentration and using that 
to break up the agglomerate.  Yet another possible substance is Calgon 
Detergent.

Just a note, I have opened my Hell Creek search to the 15000 acre ranch 
immediately to the east of mine.  My stratigraphic control is pretty 
good with a brand new (last week) water well going into Fox Creek 
Cretaceous sands at 420 feet below surface at a known location a mile 
west of my own recently dug ranch well (with the same stratigraphic 
data compensated for regional dip). In other words, I am still down in 
the Cretaceous. There are really big gullies on this new place that are 
virgin to paleontologists since the owner (who is in his late 60's) has 
never had a bone picker on his land.  The initial look down a mile long 
gully was a mixed bag with some large areas of barren aeolian dune with 
little or no stream deposits but one thin bed yielded a pretty nice 
(now paleobonded) 3 inch vertebra with a 5 + inch neural spine (as yet 
still unidentified). There was also some Cretaceous diagnostic 
microsite fauna associated with it.  The vert. was not articulated 
though and was sitting in a dune trough with some indication of running 
water and plant debris spread about.  I suspect that the dozen or so 
collecting sites on my own ranch will soon multiply. (I already have 
more digs than I can work in a life time.) The lure of fresh and 
articulated material is strong and there are miles of gully and hill 
sides to check.  The hunt goes on.

Anybody got a good used air abrasive unit for sale?

Frank Bliss
MS Biostratigraphy
Weston, Wyoming