How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Hello my pretties.

One or two of you may have been reading the blog, and been really upset when I stopped posting. I apologize. Dry your little eyes. It was suggested that I get out of vertebrate paleontology, and I had to go think about it. All that thinking made me hungry, so then I had some pie. I am happy to announce that I have decided to stay in paleo, at least in an advisory capacity as a more or less competent stratigrapher who can also draw and annoy.

It has been a busy summer. Here is a picture of me and our paleo interns, Rachel and Chuck, at the corner of a street in Holbrook that has one of the best names of any street in the world. Rachel and Chuck were both awesome and really good at finding and digging up bones, although Bill had to beat Chuck unconscious with a piece of chicken one evening at Ghost Ranch. I’m not kidding.

They are gone now and I miss them very much. Fortunately our new preparators Matt Smith and Kenny Bader (who was with us last summer) are still here, after Matt Brown left us to go to Austin, which has more culture and less Jesus and meth (per capita). Here is the whole crew on the day we finally got out the aetosaur skeleton Bill blogged recently on. From left to right are me, Rachel, Chuck, Kenny, Matt, and Bill. Bill looks possessive.

My homeboy Jonathan Weinbaum came out for his first field season at a faculty member at Southern Connecticut State University, and prospected private property to the west of the park. He got a bunch of good stuff, including diagnostic phytosaur, aetosaur, and dinosaur material out of the Sonsela Member, and I am pretty sure I can tie his locality into the Devil’s Playground section. We camped out on one of my days off and I got good and wasted, but not Jonathan because he is a respected faculty member.

In addition to finally getting our first stratigraphy paper on the Chinle Formation in the park submitted, I have also written a book review of John Foster’s Jurassic West for JVP (due out in December). Congrats to Rebecca for bagging herself a guy who can write really well. In case you haven’t read it, it presents a glut of information in a clear an interesting manner, even though the Jurassic was a time when the dinosaurs were too big.

For July 4th, I went to the “RO-DEE-O” in the nearby town of Taylor. This is a traditional western event in which livestock are humiliated and retaliate by fucking up cowboys and clowns (in fact, one of the latter got his leg broken by a bull). One of the events was watching how fast a guy on a horse can jerk a baby cow off its feet with a rope around its neck, slam it on its back, and make it think it is crippled by tying its feet together. Awesome. I realized there can only be one thought running through their cute little heads as they trot past the stands to the gate after being freed:

I am going to fucking kill ALL of you.

We had fun. The sound track for the evening included hip hop and that country-western classic, “YMCA.” These songs represent subcultures with a long history of being respected and treasured in the American West, and I was proud as hell to see the people of Taylor dancing to them.

Take care of each other,

LNJ