In our 103rd episode, we had the pleasure of speaking with Dinosaur National Monument‘s paleontologist Dr. Daniel Chure and communications professional Thea Boodhoo, about their work on the Digital Quarry, the digitization of the Carnegie Quarry at Dinosaur National Monument.

Episode 103 is also about Saltasaurus, the first known sauropod to have skin armor (osteoderms).

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In this episode, we discuss:

• The dinosaur of the day: Saltasaurus
• Name means “lizard from Salta”, named for the Salta Province where it was found
• Titanosaur that lived in the Late Cretaceous in Argentina
• Excavated in 1975-77 by Jose Fernando Bonaparte, Martin Vince, and Juan C. Leal
• Described in 1980 by Jose Bonaparte and Jaime Powell
• Type species is Saltasaurus loricatus
• Species name means “protected by small armored plates”
• Holotype is a sacrum connected to two ilia
• Saltasaurus robustus and Saltasaurus australis were suggested species, but are now cosidered to be Neuquensaurus
• More than 200 fossils have been found, from at least 2 specimens, including teeth, vertebrae from the neck, back, hip, tail, parts of the shoulder and pelvis, and limb bones
• Because of Saltasaurus, paleontologists had to reconsider sauropods (had more defense than just being massive)
• First known sauropod to have osteoderms in its skin (since found in other titanosaurs)
• Had two types of osteoderms: large oval plates that were spiked and may have been in longitudinal rows along the back, and small rounded ossicles in between the plates (these had denser bone tissue than the plates)
• Armor probably protected it from predators, and they probably lived in herds, to protect juveniles
• In the 1920s Friedrich von Huene had found armor plates in the area and thought they were Loricosaurus (ankylosaurid), but now they’re considered to be Saltasaurus
• Rodolfo A. Coria and Luis M. Chiappe said they think the osteoderms didn’t start developing until after they hatched (based on the embryos found)
• In another formation, in Patagonia, Argentina, scientists have found a titanosaur nesting site, where several hundred of them dug holes with their back feet and laid clutches, about 25 eggs each, and buried their nests. Eggs were small, about 4-5 in (11-12 cm) in diameter, and had fossilized embryos with skin impressions showing bead-like scales, with a similar armor pattern to Saltasaurus
• Considered to be small for a sauropod, though it was still large
• About 42 ft (12.8 m) long and weighed 6.8 tons, though Powell estimatesd it to be about 20 ft (6 m) long and Gregory Paul estimated it to be about 29 ft (8.5 m) long and weighing 2.5 tons
• Had a short neck, stubby limbs
• Had short hands and feet and a wide belly
• Shaped like a hippo, so Powell thought it was aquatic
• Had spongy tail vertebrae (air-filled holes covered those bones, which helped make it lighter)
• Had cylindrical teeth
• Titanosaurs are a group of sauropods, very large herbivores, that lived during the last 30 million years of the Mesozoic Era. Some titanosaur species are the largest land-living animals discovered, but in many cases, scientists have found incomplete fossils
• The name Titanosaur came from the Titans of Ancient Greek mythology
• The family, Titanosauridae, was named after Titanosaurus, an incomplete fossil (only a partial femur and two incomplete caudal vertebrae) found by Richard Lydekker in 1877. Some scientists think there is not enough information for Titanosauridae to be a genus
• Titanosaurs were the last group of sauropods. They lived about 90 to 66 million years ago and were the dominant herbivores. They replaced other sauropods, like diplodocids and brachiosaurids
• Titanosaur fossils have been found on all continents, including Antarctica. The most titanosaurs lived in the southern continents, which was then part of the supercontinent Gondwana.
• Compared to other sauropods, Titanosaurs had small heads. Their heads were also wide, with large nostrils, and crests formed by nasal bones
• Fun fact: Despite having titan in its name, Giraffatitan is not a titanosaurid, but a brachiosaurid. The word “titan” is just used to mean “giant” making its name literally “giant giraffe.”

This episode was brought to you by:

The Royal Tyrrell Museum. The Royal Tyrrell Museum is located in southern Alberta, Canada. One of the top paleontological research institutes in the world, the entire museum is dedicated to the science of paleontology. It’s definitely a must see for every dinosaur enthusiast. More information can be found at tyrrellmuseum.com.

Permia. Permia is a prehistoric apparel and art brand, dedicated to creating collectible, scientifically accurate restorations of ancient life. Their creations are available now on their Kickstarter page or Permia.com.

For those who may prefer reading, see below for the full transcript of our interview with Dr. Daniel Chure and Thea Boodhoo:

Garret: And now on to our interview with Dan Chure and Thea Boodhoo who worked on the Dinosaur and National Monument Digital Quarry project. Dan Chure has been the paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monument since 1979. And the Digital Quarry Project is really his initiative to share this amazing resource at Dinosaur National Monument with researchers and interested public throughout the world.

And Thea Boodhoo who we spoke to back with the Institute for the Study of Mongolian dinosaurs a few months back, is a communication professional who seeks out challenges in natural sciences and led the web development on the beta version of the digital quarry project. So now on to the interview, very basic question for Dan. So you’ve been at the Dinosaur National Monument more than just about anybody, what kind of changes have you seen throughout your time there?

Dan Chure: Well probably the major change is the completion of the excavation, the main bone layer in the Carnegie Quarry that’s inside the quarry exhibit hall, and now moving from that emphasis on a single site out to the wide range of formations in the fossil record that scattered throughout Dinosaur National Monument. And as amazing as the Carnegie Quarry deposit is, it turns out the rocks outside of that building are equally amazing and the diversity and abundance of fossils and the tremendous range of ecosystems that’s preserved in dinosaur.

Garret: Cool. You recently did the Digital Quarry Project and that’s basically a project to show all of the fossil wall online, is that right?

Dan Chure: Well the Carnegie Quarry has a very long and complex history both as a site that was extensively excavated and material taken away to outside institutions and prepared and studied. A large part of it left unexcavated that is now inside the building with about 1500 dinosaur bones exposed and left in place just as they were deposited. And then an extension of that sandstone layer outside the building for a couple of hundred meters that is basically unexcavated. So those are three different kinds of datasets for the same deposit.

And associated with that kind of historical complexity becoming a national park developing an [inaudible 00:02:36] exhibit, there’s an immense and rich historical, personal, scientific interpretive, planning, construction history. And the Digital Quarry Project and the Carnegie Quarry website are designed to make that huge amount of data available to anyone who might be interested. Historians, architects, paleontologists, the public and kind of the most—maybe the most interesting part of that is the Digital Quarry Project which involves the existing quarry and the bones and data associated with them.

Garret: Great.

Sabrina: So that’s an ongoing project, right?

Dan Chure: It’s an unending project in a sense. We’re primarily dealing with our own archives right now but there’s extensive archives at the Carnegie Museum in the Smithsonian that we haven’t even touched yet. So it’s very large and it’s very organic, so we will as data becomes available, we continue to digitize it and get it and upload it. Twenty years ago you would try to do this as a book which would have to be severely restricted in scope and size and be out of print. And the great thing about doing this on the web is that it’s primarily available and it’s easy to modify and grow and expand.

Garret: Cool. So I think on the web page where you can explore the wall and click on the bones and see pictures and details, it says that there are about 550 bones on it now and there’s a total of 1500, is that right or? Well in the wall that’s excavated, but then there’s been another couple thousand that have actually been fully excavated.

Dan Chure: Correct.

Garret: So how does—what’s the process for adding more bones like.

Thea Boodhoo: I’ll take that one. So we started out with one leg for the very first prototype which we didn’t really show anybody and it was just to see if we could make it work last summer in 2015 to see how like we could take the illustrations that had been done the prior to summer by some [inaudible 00:04:49] participants and turn them into interactive web assets. And that first bone, it was you click on it, or you roll over it and you see the name of the bone and then it evolved over the course of 12 weeks into something a little bit bigger.

We took a small section of the wall that had those 550 bones, and it sounds like a lot of bones, it is a small section of that wall, but it does have some pretty cool bones. So we got the piece – the part that had the Camarasaurus skull and then articulated leg. So it’s probably the most charismatic part of them all. And we started there for a launch to be able to have a proof of concepts and to really get the ball rolling and say, “Hey we’ve got this kicked off now.” And the process—how detailed do you want me to get because I can tell you about creating the SVG file and how I got into PHP, but maybe no one really wants to hear that.

Garret: We’re not actually, that was awful, and then we started getting computer samples.

Thea Boodhoo: So I have a little bit of information about them in my poster. Maybe we can go over it later and then you can decide.

Garret: Cool.

Thea Boodhoo: Well basically in order to add a new one, there’s several steps. So we’re working with it based on an illustration, that’s an illustrated file that Daniel too worked on in 2014, and that has to be—let’s see, I actually did a little bit of work last summer updating the whole rest of the file to make sure that the individual paths for each bone are named with a corresponding catalogue number.

Garret: That’s important.

Thea Boodhoo: It’s quite detailed. So the catalogue number it turns out in us here, this is actually sort of a really fun accidental discovery. I had like a hunch and then followed through and amazingly it worked out wonderfully. That never happens. But when you take the path name, on Illustrator, and you give it a specific descriptive name in this case we picked the catalogue number so that we had a corresponding path to catalogue numbers so the illustration of a femur is the same as the actual catalogue number that goes to that femur.

So then we export it as an SVG file which is it doesn’t really matter what that is anyway, but it means that there is a corresponding piece of text that has now that catalogue number, so when I went back through and was trying to design it, I was able to then make that individual path interactive. And that was pretty awesome to find out how easy that turned out to be actually, and it meant that we got a lot more done in 2015 than Dan or anybody and even especially me maybe really thought was possible. And we were able to launch that website for the public on the anniversary of the park in October of that year. And it’s still the limited part.

So in order to add any new bone, we would never do it one by one, so we took that first smaller section of 551 actually very close fossils first. And then phase two would be to say have all of the fossils that are there in the modern quarry that are on display in the quarry exhibit hall. And then eventually expand out maybe in sections as we get the data together or maybe all at once if we end up doing it that way we don’t have a specific outline for that yet. But eventually to have all of the historic fossils from the quarry as well and that almost quadruples the total number from the modern quarries, so it’s insane. Actually it’s an insane number of fossils.

Garret: Yeah.

Thea Boodhoo: But the SVG file format gives us such a small like compact wealth of experience, so we’re like we would be able to have that really be realistic with small loading times.

Garret: Cool yeah.

Thea Boodhoo: So it’s so mobile friendly.

Garret: It’s a pretty good website. I mean even on the hotel internet here, it was easy to go through and click on everything.

Thea Boodhoo: That’s really good to hear. I’ve been trying to add.

Garret: So is it about a 1000 left in the actual wall?

Thea Boodhoo: Probably that’s pretty close. Yeah there’re 1000 missing stuff from the website that are in the current.

Garret: You definitely got—well you got all the ones that I remember, when I was looking I was like there are more, but there’s so many to remember like I remember the Stegosaurus plates are in there.

Thea Boodhoo: Yeah.

Garret: And then you said there’s the Camarasaurus skull and neck going along with it and the big leg from the diplodocid, is that what it…?

Thea Boodhoo: Yeah it is the diplodocid. Actually the first prototype was that the diplodocid and I made the title of that demo website a deplocacid leg, that’s all I remember.

Garret: That’s funny.

Thea Boodhoo: Yeah.

Garret: Cool. But then you have—there’s also this picture on there and it shows the modern wall and then inside that there’s a little picture of what is on the website but then outside that is the one where it shows everything else that’s been excavated like you said.

Thea Boodhoo: Oh yeah, so one of the other geographer participants in 2015 put together a little map that has that whole illustration and then she marked off like the area that was included, that was a good thing to do, it’s been helpful.

Garret: Was it literally like all one face like that picture looks like or is that a little bit simplified?

Thea Boodhoo: I’ll pass on to Dan.

Dan Chure: So the bone deposit is in a sandstone layer that’s about six meters, also 20 feet thick. And the rock above the load of mud stones they don’t have any fossils. So it’s a very concentrated deposit that occurs the bones are ultimately buried in the bottom of a river channel and the river is probably 25 feet deep. So the geologists who studied that said it maybe a couple hundred feet across. So it’s not particularly huge river but it’s a permanent river that flows more or less year round unless there are sustained droughts.

So we do know the bone layer is very restricted, and so in effect removing the sandstone layer is what happened historically in collecting the bones. So when you look at that map everything above the outline of the existing quarry is completely gone. The entire top of the hill and the east and west sides no longer exist. Those are now air space around the existing quarry. So if you’re in the quarry building looking at the sandstone layer to see the extent on that map, you have to imagine that sandstone layer extending another 50 feet up in the air and 100 or 150 fifty feet on each side.

Garret: And that’s what they are for now?

Dan Chure: Yeah right. The recent discovery was about 50 feet above the top of the existing quarry.

Garret: That’s really amazing.

Dan Chure: It’s an immense quarry and when Earl Douglas found this first a tail vertebrae sticking out of the ground, he, I’m sure he had no idea. I mean you can read his diary entries and after about a month and a half, he says, “This may take more time than we initially thought,” because by then he had started to run across multiple sort of skeletons and those are the biggest dinosaurs you can possibly find.

Sabrina: Those are great. And this was back in 1915, right?

Dan Chure: Well this was discovered in 1909.

Sabrina: Oh good.

Dan Chure: And the Carnegie excavated there between 1909 and 1922. Smithsonian came in 1923.The University of Utah came in 1924 and that was the last year of that historic excavations phase. It became a national monument in 1950, but the excavations continued under yearly permits.

Sabrina: Wow. I saw on the website too there was a great section of the history of the quarry right and the people who have worked there over the years.

Thea Boodhoo: So a lot of the articles that are on the website were written mostly by Elliott Smith who is a geologist quarry participant. And I know Trinity Sterling who is a geologist, who is another geo quarry participant who has written a number of them as well. And they’re based largely on the archives that we had in the library there. So a large part of the summer that we spent working on this together was spent in—can I describe the library?

Garret: Sure.

Thea Boodhoo: So after the renovation of the exhibit hall a few years ago, there had been a lab and a proper lab, labs like those are no longer and it all got moved into one of the employee housing houses and so there’s a garage and it’s now a library, and it spends on the air conditioner and what not. It’s mostly mouse proof I think as long as you keep the door closed. And there’s a ton of material and they’re just packed in, so every single wall on all sides is just covered with books and records, and we spent a long time going through and digitizing those and as we were digitizing them, we started having all these ideas for articles that we should have.

And of course Dan already had some that he’d wanted to do before and where we went we found new material and also make ideas for posters and other things. So just a ton came out of that and 100 year history in a pack, you get a lot of interesting things. So that covers the entire Cold War, both world wars, the Vietnam War, the great depression, so many amazing like bits of history in there.

And so when we were working on this article as I know Eliot was really interested in that kind of stuff too. So he made a point of trying to like explore what was going on in the park at those times, and there’s probably a lot more we could still add. But yeah for 12 weeks of work about a year ago and it only happens in spots like that. So it’s growing up in a good pace I think?

Garret: Yeah.

Thea Boodhoo: And then a lot more got done last summer too.

Sabrina: So every summer you work on it a little bit more?

Thea Boodhoo: That’s how it’s been going so far.

Sabrina: And then there’s also everything is in GitHub, right? So anybody who knows PHP can develop and help.

Thea Boodhoo: Correct. So one of the last things I did on that project in 2015 before I stepped away to work on some other things, was to put all of the relevant web files on GitHub and just sort of made sure that in our press release people knew that they could contribute. And I know once I had much bandwidth to do a lot of work in the off season on this because at that point it’s in your free time. But we have other couple of people who are interested in doing a little bit of work.

We got a nice bit of code from somebody last summer that helped actually solve one of the big problems with the digital quarry so not to get too technical again, but each one of those bones has a thing called a modal window that comes up, that’s what we call it. And that’s just a little panel that opens in the back kind of dems out, so you’re just looking at this little card that’s information about the bone. We call it a modal, so each one of those is a piece of code.

And I didn’t know too much about how to really pull this off when I started it, so we were working with a limited number of bones, so it was feasible and I had hunted each one of those but I knew that there must be a way too. I knew there must be a way to make them more efficient and to basically create one modal and a code that then fed in the data, and so that it was much less work to not have to hand create each one of those which seemed insane to me. And we did get a little piece of that puzzle that was missing fixed last summer. So that actually was great progress and it opens the door for making much faster progress and if we have some more bandwidth to get back in it.

Sabrina: That’s great.

Thea Boodhoo: Yeah.

Garret: Last question about the original wall, is there enough information in the records because I know a lot of the old excavations weren’t recorded super well where you can actually tell what part of the wall some of these original Carnegie excavations were from, where you could feasibly make a pseudo digital quarry for that section?

Dan Chure: Well Earl Douglas actually was very careful in the excavations, and realized very early on especially since he had a very dense part of the quarry right off that it was going to be important to keep an accurate map. It turned out to be way more important than he thought it would be because it extended over 15 years in multiple institutions. So he actually painted with black paint for food grades on the quarry face, and then would map the bones and then the bones would be removed, and then those had coordinates the vertical and horizontal components they had created and they just follow that in both directions as they did the excavations.

So the end result is for the historic maps for a huge amount of material that has been removed. We actually have a very accurate map, and we know the relationships of all those bones to one another. The tricky bit is how does that relate to the existing quarry, so we can position those correctly. Unfortunately there are one or two specimens that continue from the present day quarry on to the historic maps, and that allows us to get fairly close approximation of where everything is.

So we feel pretty confident that this is as reasonably accurate a map as you can have for an excavation that’s going on in the early part of the 20^th Century. And it was it was really quite genius that Douglas had the foresight to do that, because even today people still use those quarry maps and those relationships when dealing with isolated bones or partial bones and what things may be part of the same individual.

In the University of Utah maps which we have, have never appeared in print. So we have a whole block of data that researchers have never seen and that’s part of what, part of what’s in that map and then Rebecca Esplin who is a graduate student for Brook Spirit down in BYU is working on a big digitized map of the entire quarry, but really concentrating especially on historic maps where we now have the data so we know the field number for every single bone on those historic maps.

And then we can tie those two database that says, “What it is, what element it is, what animal it came from, what’s the field number, what’s the catalog number, what’s its current repository, what other numbers had been assigned to it, where it has appeared in scientific print.” Ideally we would like to have a photo for each of those as well but obviously that’s a massive project, and I think at some time we will probably bring in other institutions like the Carnegie and the Smithsonian who would be interested in being involved together. But right now we’re still working on the things that we can control, have ownership to which is a tremendous amount to begin with.

Garret: Yeah. It’s awesome. And then once you have that digital a map of all the previous excavations that could be a huge help for your work Thea.

Thea Boodhoo: So it’s interesting you mention that. One of the things that we’ve been planning for the beginning for this, is different ways to be able to look at that map when it’s maybe before it’s finished depending on which pieces of a case we get in first, right?

Garret: Mm-hmm.

Thea Boodhoo: So we want to be able to have people zoom in and out on that map that’s an obvious feature. Right now you can only pan around and we want to be able to see the whole thing at once, and we wouldn’t be able to filter it. So I want to be able to click something and then see just the bones that are at the Carnegie Museum or just the bones that are like in Africa right now, because these ones have gone all over the world and it’s really amazing. Maybe even with a map or they might cut it up I don’t know.

Imagine also if you can filter that by text. We did some other experiments with that in our code, it didn’t come out in the version that’s live now, but we had an older prototype where we were filtering by text and it was actually a lot of fun. Actually there’s a lot of applications for those foreign interpretive stuff at the park too. So they got really excited about this when it was available, and there is just barely enough and access of the [inaudible 00:21:13]. So that we can have an iPad up there and it’s actually a pretty convenient tool.

We tested it out when we finally had a working prototype, we took our iPads up to the quarry hall and we were looking at it and I—this is kind of a really cool moment for me. I was looking at the quarry wall from that second floor balcony, and I was looking at the bones and trying to put myself in the place of someone who was visiting and maybe hadn’t been there before and trying to remember my first time which was a long time ago actually in 1997 for the first time.

But I had looked at like one of the bones and then looked at our website which was on our iPad and I matched it up on the relative faces like, okay if I go down from the Camarasaurus skull and then over yeah that’s the one. I tapped on it, it opened up some little modal window and here was information, I was like, “Oh my God, that’s the Stegosaurus plate, this is awesome, this is really cool.” So the potential of that one is actually fully finished, I totally see it being living in the [inaudible 00:22:20] hall and I don’t know what the real plans for this are, but it there was actually a string that we had. I know we talked about this, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Garret: Yeah but it’s all the digitizers, the opportunities just keep coming. You could think of about doing a projection of the old wall or something.

Thea Boodhoo: Interesting.

Garret: In like VR, there is a million things you can do.

Thea Boodhoo: The VR, that’s an interesting question because I’ve totally thought about that and Dan didn’t we get a 3D scan of it finally of the whole wall?

Dan Chure: So we had a lighter scan done of the quarry wall, pro bono by Autodesk. So we have about four point two billion measurements off of there and we have seven millimeter accuracy and we’re next going to be doing photogrammetry to then lay off the rider to get high resolution three dimensional images of the quarry which would be fantastic just not for visitors but for scientific researchers.

And I mean to get back to the database that Thea was talking about in terms of the way she could query the map, all of the major specimens that have been found at Dinosaur have been described, most of the more than once in the scientific literature, but there’s still a very, very large number of bones that have not appeared in the scientific literature. Not that scientists haven’t looked at them, they just haven’t appeared in the literature.

And what this project is doing in terms of science, looking at how scientists would use it, is if you’re coming to Dinosaur, so you got to imagine dinosaur is this huge sample of the dinosaur population from 150 million years ago. So we have lots and lots of animals of different ages and you know they’re all more or less living together at the same time. They’re not at different quarries at different levels and in different distances from one another.

So if you were interested for example in Camarasaurus and you wanted a quarry where there were adults and juvenile so you could study growth rates, you can go theoretically go to the map quarry for Camarasaurus and not only see where all the bones came from but where they are now. So you know what institutions you need to go to and because many of the isolated bones haven’t appeared in print, this may give you a much better idea of what relevant material is an institution, how much time you should spend there and target exactly what elements you want to see first.

Sabrina: That will be amazing. So for people who are interested in learning more or possibly getting involved if they can is the best site carnegiequarry.com?

Dan Chure: Yes.

Sabrina: Good we’ll post that on our blog.

Dan Chure: One last point. So a story I like to tell about dinosaur. I tell this many, many times, but traditionally the place that the general public non-scientific community learns about dinosaurs has been by going to museums or in the Renaissance cavities of curiosity, where fossils have been collected from places, brought together and maybe cleaned up and mounted or just put on display and people can see there’s and seeing a mounted skeleton is always an extremely impressive thing to do and dinosaur skeletons are always the biggest draw for natural history museums, and for hundreds of years that was the way the public learned about dinosaurs. And that huge kind of philosophical jump occurred in the early 1950s when the Park Service decided to go ahead and develop in place exhibited dinosaur.

And there for the first time we brought the museum to where the fossils were and the public was able to see them being exposed and left in place just as they were deposited 150 million years ago. And that’s been a phenomenal success with both the scientific community and the general public. So tying all this data to that change in the way that we talk about fossils is in a sense taking—we’ve brought the museums from the quarry and now we’re taking the quarry in the museum to the world through the website. And I guess the greatest compliment is being imitated and there’s about 100 sites around the world where other fossils are now left in place and exposed. So it’s kind of part of that history and legacy of dinosaur as a totally new way of looking at and understanding fossils.

Garret: When we went there for the first time, actually we’ve only been there once, it was amazing because seeing all of them in place and the variety, like you said, how many animals were coexisting. You always see, you go to a natural history museum and they’ve got the Stegosaurus next to the [inaudible 00:27:06] and whatever that doesn’t make any sense, but seeing the actual set of dinosaurs are all living together, it’s really cool.

Sabrina: So one last question we ask everybody this. What’s your favorite dinosaur?

Dan Chure: Whichever one I’m working on at the time. I love all my children.

Thea Boodhoo: Well today I’m going to say Stegosaurus because I’m back in the dinosaur world and Dinosaur National Monument world rather.

Sabrina: That is a good one.

Thea Boodhoo: I want to give a shout out to some of the other people who worked on this project. So we only talked about the parts so far that Ellie and Trinity have worked on and [inaudible 00:27:49] did the illustrations. But Nicole Ridgwell did a ton of work the year before I was there in 2014 and also last summer and she’s still working. She took a ton of photographs of fossils that we are using in the website now, so a lot of the ones that you see in there and those models are by her. So [inaudible 00:28:08] was there last summer as well s doing a lot of work on the archives. I’m not sure what else she was doing because I wasn’t there the whole time then.

Dan Chure: Sarah also worked on looking at documenting insect traces on the dinosaur bones and the quarry face where insects were feeding on the bones while they were in the flood plain before they got washed in and buried in the bottom of the quarry, and so she was scrambling all over the quarry face most of the summer and taking notes and photographs and that was a really interesting and needed piece of scientific data for the quarry that we didn’t have.

Garret: Something I didn’t think about before, that’s cool.

Thea Boodhoo: The insect traces on there actually, one of them were interesting, it’s really interesting. And we didn’t even talk about the unionides. There is a shout out to our freshwater invertebrate friends who got a bunch of unionides. There is an article about them on the website actually.

Garret: We’ll look into it.

Thea Boodhoo: I also want to mention Marie Immanence who spent 2015 there with me as well. And she did so much work on the archiving, scanning, working on the database, doing meditative for me and so many things. So she was all in the [inaudible 00:29:21], so pay special attention to her. But she was a huge, huge, huge help and she’s become a good friend of mine.

Garret: Sure, yeah, there’s quite a list of people on the website that have contributed.

Thea Boodhoo: Yeah there’s actually a lot I’m forgetting now.

Garret: But they’re on the website.

Dan Chure: One other person is [inaudible 00:29:40] who was a GIP last summer and she had a real passion for database. She told me so when she got here I gave her the job of tracking down all the obscure specimens, they have very complicated histories traveled around through many museums to whereabouts unknown, and she fortunately just loved doing that. She was a great bulldog at it, and actually tracked down and got photographs of specimens that we thought we would never ever be able to locate where they had gone.

Garret: Awesome.

Dan Chure: So she really flashed out important parts of the database and that was not only good for us, that was extremely helpful for Rebecca who is the BYU student who’s working on the bigger and more detailed maps.

Thea Boodhoo: So I mentioned that there are fossil specimens from Carnegie Quarry now all over the world. If anyone has one of those specimens, could you take a picture of it, then send it to us.

Garret: Yeah that’s part of the way people get help the most.

Thea Boodhoo: That would actually pretty help yeah, because I know people who work at these museums they kind of listen to this. That would be great.

Sabrina: That sounds good. And this is a really good example of having so many people come together through dinosaurs and you meet so many people and you get to do all these great things, and in this podcast we keep hearing more and more of these awesome stories. So thanks for talking with us today.

Thea Boodhoo: You’re welcome.

Dan Chure: My pleasure.