Montana - Land of dinosaurs

Uncovering a specimen for the first time in seventy five million years is a pretty exciting experience. Thats part of what excites me I guess is that you do get to go out in the field and you get to prod around all these great hills around Montana and find dinosaurs. Egg Mountain's a very interesting place to look for dinosaurs the main fascination is that it's a place that preserved dinosaur eggs. Its pry the richest egg locality in Montana and what's really interesting about a place were dinosaurs have laid eggs is thats the place were they were doing their thing. They created the nest, they deposit the eggs, so we can really get a sense of how dinosaurs lived by studying a place like Egg Mountain. So this is an old site that Jack Horner found a Dromaeosaur in and what we're doing now is sort of going back and seeing what else has eroded out over the years. And we did find a couple pieces of the foot, which is sort of promising. He didn't find the original, the entire full skeleton so were hoping to find the rest of it here. So part of our project is to kind of clean up all the stuff thats maybe eroded out over the years. I think the advantage of the paleo field camp is that we are emphasizing the scientific aspects of data collecting. Not just excavating a specimen but how you collect data, how you interpret data. Its discovering, it's here, it's accessible, so we don't have to get in a spaceship and fly to Mars to try to discover things. We can do it right here, Montana's just a beautiful place for that. The geology here of course is some of the best in world for paleontological research, and there's nothing like that feeling of getting into a quarry, opening it up, and finding that bit of bone sticking out and you start cleaning it off and you start working back into the wall. Maybe the teeth then start showing up and for several moments, really for about as long as you can keep your excitement to yourself. You are the only human being that has ever seen this material.