Phytosaur Skull Excavation IV

The last post in this series showed us jacketing our phytosaur skull (see below). The next step after the plaster dries is to flip the block. This is a small jacket and in a sandstone so we are not expecting any problems.Ha! The block flipped cleanly and is ready to be transported out. The one (only) good thing about not having much of the skull present is that it is simple to get it back to the truck (especially when you cannot drive to the site, which is common at the Petrified Forest). I'm not quite sure what Jeff is doing here. I think that he was trying to lighten the jacket a bit.

Nothing left to do but to fill the quarry hole back in. Get to it Jeff! (It's good to be the boss)

Good news! Not all is lost. While we were excavating this specimen, the landowners located another skull about a mile away at approximately the same stratigraphic horizon. This on definitely looks to be upside down and hopefully more complete! We should get to this once our interns arrive in about a month. Stay tuned!