DAY FOUR – LANCEFIELD DIG – LOTS OF DIRT AND BONE
Oh….my……gawd!
I had the BEST day in the many BESTEST days I’ve ever had since falling in love with rocks! After rushing around and doing all my jobs to ensure the welfare and comfort of all my volunteers (I take my job very seriously with chocolate zucchini cake – the green bits are NOT those kind of green bits – and giant Anzac cookies), I made my way over to the dig site. Immediately I launched myself upon the mounds that have yielded bone and teeth and began scrambling through dirt, clay and who knows what (could be million year old shit for all I know!) and with sterile rubber gloves, I began plucking bits of bone and teeth. I was happy as a proverbial geologist/paleontologist in mud!
With me elbow deep in mud, my walkie talkie went off with my Long-Suffering Mentor needing help in showing a reporter around the site. After cleaning myself off I deftly managed to try and look as professional as I could while wearing flannel and being covered head to toe in mud, and as Sanja showed the reporter to the mound I had just been working on, I looked down……
Right in front of my toe was a half mandible complete with teeth sticking out of the dirt! The timing was perfect as the reporter watched me lose my shit and yell at everyone to get a bag, don’t touch it without gloves, and back off – in a very professional manner of course! Overall we made such a great impression we made it on to the channel seven news. Now I’m famous!
Yeah…..she wasn’t that happy about walking around a swamp…….
Anyhoo, when we had managed to dispatch all the reporters, children, and spectators, I again fell arse up into the pile of dirt looking for more bone and teeth. I was in my element pulling out more shards of bone, metatarsals, intact jaw fragments, and some beautiful samples of quartz, feldspar, and even jasper.
At around 1pm I realised if I didn’t hurry back to camp and eat and take my drugs my Dad would be storming over to yell at me in front of all the other paleos and geos and embarrassing me at the age of 43 years old……so I went and rested for a while (read….10 minutes)…..and then I was back on site continuing my search for really cool stuff. Zoe was in her element and Elliott was working hard!
So, here are some examples of what we found today……
This bone, we think is a bone from a Macropus titan – the Andre The Giant of the kangaroo world! In situ, this bone was about the size of my arm. It was too fragmented to dig out and we are still trying to figure out exactly what to do with it.
We are bit excited about this one as the scratch marks that you can see in the middle of the bone are cut marks, indicating animal bite marks. We bone people find that interesting!
So, we are all very tired, extremely dirty and the aroma of something untoward may be hanging in the air of the common room, but we are all happy and excited about all the findings from this dig. On a final note……here is a photo of my Long-Suffering mentor holding a sthenurus skull which was a very large, robust kangaroo-like animal. She looks happy because she’s just made a joke that the skull looks like Strop from the Paul Hogan Show……only she would make that kind of joke……perhaps I am the long-suffering one!
