POHS Paleo Day 5 - Ren Shimada

Today was a little different from the other days. As we were finishing our breakfast, we received news that unfortunately Mr. Temple would not be able to join us in the field. As we tried to figure out what today's plan would be with Mr. Temple out, we also received news that Dr. Bakker, who is the curator of the paleontology exhibit at the HMNS, had arrived from Colorado. When we arrived in town, we sat down with Dr. Bakker to join him for breakfast. It amazes me how like Mr. Temple, he has so many interesting stories and facts to tell us. We sat with him for about half an hour as we listened to him talk about his knowledge of the dig site and him joking about how he has a degree from Harvard and that we don't. When we actually started working at the site,  he gave us another orientation of each site that we had been working at and explained how each layer and bed of rock contained different fossils. I ended up working on a variety of different things today which included continuing to "mushroom" (dig around and underneath) the plaster containing a baby dimetrodon spine and back-fin and laying down more messy layers of plaster. While the plaster was drying, Asa and I went to help out with clearing the walls of another site. Within a few minutes, Asa had already found a dimetrodon vertebrae as well as a thin spine. Although it took me a little longer, Miss Lee who we were working with, helped me to find what we also think is part of a thin spine of the same dimetrodon. (named Dr. Bob) We hope that tomorrow's forecasted rain does not wash away the work that we did today but we will just have to hope for the best. Once we closed up shop and finished for the day, we went along with Mr. Whitley: the owner of the land of the site, to go see his longhorn cattle. Although none of us became the new "Calf Whisperer", it was relaxing to just go and hang out with and feed the longhorns.