Chasing History: Montana Dino Dig!

hey everybody my name is chase pipes and you're watching chasing history brought to you by airheads calm and smoked him out in relic room in Montana so cool we're here with my buddy aiming Jager aiming dude thank you so much your site dude so here's what Aemon doing is he's come out and he's identified a dinosaur site and he's gonna be getting it prepped up and ready to go and excavate down into the ground to expose some dinosaur stuff so it talked us about work you know where were we at what are we looking for what formation is this all that stuff so where are we are in the to medicine formation of Northwest Montana it's a companion cretaceous formation so we find a lot of really odd dinosaurs because mostly inland it wasn't along the ocean shore from the Great Western waterway so what are you looking for dinosaurs out here you want to look for just little small piles of just dinosaur bone and you see them pretty rough coming on the ground leaving weathered really heavily the roots have grown through in them but it's a good sign that if you go further underground there's a better preservation and better things you know underneath of it so what you really want to look for this is big chunks of bone that have very open cell structure and you can see exactly that it's bone so and then you look forward in the surrounding area where it could be leeching from and you can see where we've started to uncover a bonus popping out of the ground here yes right here and here's something that I've been wanting to get across to a lot of people is is is you know just you know how much of this stuff is on the surface that's getting oh yeah it's getting weird absolutely you'll find a lot of the stuff on the surface and you know if you don't get to it in time it just weathers out and just gets destroyed you can see that the roots start to overtake it right and water and snow will start to destroy it and so you have to be pretty quick on it and otherwise you know it's not gonna it's not gonna be collectible after a while right exactly and you know that's an important thing you know to do is is to get out here and to collect this stuff before it gets destroyed absolutely and that's what's so great about having guys like you out here Clinton these fields looking for spots and layers and grabbing this bone and saving it oh yeah and just another you know five years or so this could be completely gone okay see here's here's here's something that you guys have got to keep in mind is that you know dinosaur fossils aren't rare okay this is a huge country that we live in there are fossils all over the place all right you know you're talking about species that live for millions and millions and millions of years you know and there are a lot of fossils present you know so there's so much of it that gets exposed that it's important to go out and to collect this stuff because if you don't it's gonna do come and check this out look what's happening see how this bone right here is all breaking away the roots are going through it it's all exploding into pieces and like Amon was saying like Amon was saying in another five years this will be gone you know but what's cool is there's enough here to identify it I know what kind of a bone do we have so this looks like a big duckbill tibia bone from a hadrosaur of the two medicine more than likely it's from al anbiya store though that is called a high Packer source it's definitely big enough and the head pack restore is the largest duck-billed dinosaur in the to medicine formation oh wow yeah they got about 35 feet long when they're a full adult okay so they're there they're pretty big they're pretty cool animals though they had a big crown coming off the top of their skulls oh okay so you're you keep saying to medicine and to medicine formation it Blayne what that is to people what is a formation so the formation is a specific general area usually it can be you know four or five hundred meters thick or so and you're able to trace the antique lines and the student lines back to a specific age during the dinosaur era so this one in particular is about 70 4.2 million years old it's a pretty mid-cretaceous layer and like I said you know eastern Montana was oceanfront beachfront property but this area during the companion part of the Cretaceous era or the to medicine was inland so we have a bunch of weird little herding dinosaurs that would roam the hillsides in the swamps so that's interesting so most of the fossils that are found you know in the you know further further east of Montana you know those are all you know stuff that lived along the beaches and things like that and there's a lot of sites like that exposed but when you get back up into here going towards West you're kind of in the hilly mountainous area and so you get a totally different kind of done dude that's so cool that so these these are like because you're inland that's an entirely different ecological system giving you an entirely different kind of dinosaurs that's so cool it's very interesting and and they're very rare in just odd and there's not a lot of people that really look in these areas they look for more big open Badlands you like the Badlands you see in the drives I guess now why don't why don't many people come out you know looking is it just so difficult it can be it's very difficult to know how to read read the land and as you can see it's so green here you know it can be very difficult to even identify the Badlands from afar so okay so how do you identify it like the site were on how did you go about finding this side you drive around ass yeah a lot a lot of foot work mainly so you have to get in touch with the landowner you want to get on private property obviously yeah that's you don't do anything on public land that's a big thing as far as vertebrate fossils go so you want to get on private land and you just try to make a connection with the landowners and you just be upfront honest with them dick hey you know I look for fossils for a living I have a sneaking suspicion that could be fossils on your property would you be okay with me coming out and prospecting and you know most the time like I said as long as you're honest with them most won't say no yeah that's cool so so you get permission to get out on the property and then you walk around when you walk around like come on let's walk let's walk this way because we don't want when I walk around and look you know it's just I mean just look look look around us guys I mean it's just it's crazy to see how you would figure out where stuff is at so what would you do would you just walk along these hills and then look for spool of bones popping out look down the hillside here you can see you got this big layer of rocks right here anything down he can see the same way or continue okay so so do you guys you guys see this so look what we've got right here okay all right stand right there so we've got this layer right here that's going down like this and then we look down a little further and we've got that other layer going down at an angle as well so that's your said anticline layer well this is this is a layer within the anticline okay so the antique lines are a bunch of layers that are composed into a fold I guess okay and the center of the anti pine wall okay I mean if we don't know the relative age then we call this incline okay so but yes this is one of the layers within the antique line and you just want to try to see and look at it if it continues so now generally right underneath these layers in this case it's on top because the way they're angled but underneath the layers is where you gonna find dinosaur bones oh you know here when you're going through the Badlands and you see soft clay then a hard rock line and then soft clay and a hard line but hard rock line represents an age of disease I guess you could say for the land some sort of nice lay the extinction had to happen at that point in time a hurricane a major earthquakes and big tsunamis can happen too in all sorts of different cataclysms and now you want to look right underneath that hard sandstone because that's usually the extinction line we're gonna find the fossils themselves preserved okay so whenever you see a hard sandstone line like this going through the land I get really excited okay we're gonna walk this line right up against it and we're gonna just look for a little bits of bone popping out if you don't see anything right up against the line then you drop down five feet and you start trying to walk the next layer and see if you find anything in the next layer and just go to that so on and so on and so on so okay so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna walk this layer with a man and see if we see a few things popping out and when we come back we'll yeah oh dude dinosaurs this is so cool come on deep let's go see all right so we were walking along and I spotted something that's really cool and here's something that you know a lot of people don't understand is this dinosaur bones don't all fossil the same way some fossilized different than others and there's different grades of bone and toss them once awesome job dude explain what's going on here this is all the big bone that's blown up I mean 20 years ago would have been a great bone to collect and been able to do something with it because it sat here in weather it's exploded a million pieces and it's too far gone to put back together but what we can do with it is because this one's interesting there's still people that want to study this that want to look at this and learn things from it there's people that like fluorescent minerals and things like that and so what we have is it's the core out of a bone this would have been a theropod which had a hollow core like a bird so that hollow core filled up with seventh part way but then that Hollow stayed hollow and it allowed crystals to form inside that hollow core so because that's different than the bone it was the only thing that survived when it whether it blew up so what we can do with this we can take it back and clean it up we can check with the fluorescent light it'll probably glow and stuff and some people won't actually really still enjoy this rather than just let it wash away and be gone forever that's so cool how can it glow in the dark what's going what's going on there that well the different mineral different minerals fluoresce different under different lights calcite is one of the ones that flores's this looks like calcite by the structure the crystals in the Jurassic we had a lot of bright reds and greens that's cranium salts but every mineral fluoresce differently under different light that's so cool so you know that's what's important is is is just because you know a bone might be exploded doesn't mean that there's still not an awesome story to tell I mean it's always it's a cell it's a selfish mission a lot of times we're trying to save what we can before it's gone right exactly because this is another example how many more years do you think this would have lasted a couple more years even these pieces would have been so small they been washed down and washed away I mean if you look this salt ball this all just takes totally exploded and pieces of bone that there's than left of and see that's why it's important to cut to not let this stuff get destroyed the let nature because here's what's nature's doing you know nature's helping us out but it's also hurting us as well because what it's doing is is the geological forces are exposing these layers allowing us to find this stuff but it's also turning everything back into dirt that's what nature wants to do with rocks is it wants to take it from a big piece and break it all down to little bitty tiny particles and these bones that are inside these layers that's exactly what's happening so you know there are there's all across the United States there are examples like this where there is a bone turning back into dirt and unless people are allowed to collect it and and find good use for it and get it to the right people who can study it it's just going to turn back into dirt and a huge opportunity is gonna be lost as far as scientific study goes and so that's why it's so awesome and important what you guys are doing out here it's going out and you're recognizing this stuff and grabbing it and make sure that it gets collected and into the right hands and to me dude that's that's so cool man you would have never known that existed because it wouldn't be broken open you wouldn't see the middle of the drive so if you don't pick up these weather pieces these pieces are exploded nobody gets to study this and - guys see that layers see that there and right there see the different rocks that's going on ty what's going on here so so what it is is it would have been sitting in the ground this way you can actually tell okay this is actually dirt this is actually sediment the same stuff that the bone was buried in it had a hole in the bone somewhere and it filled up that void it's called a water line okay a nice flat line were filled up with sediment but it's still left a void at the top and then the calcite and then the crystals the bristles grew through the fluids that came in later on that's so cool that's nice man dude you've got that that's a story in and of itself that's so awesome that's so cool man god that's awesome nice nice save dude that is pillar all right so here's here's a cool little spot we had we had picked out you marked it with rocks earlier in the day come here and check this out so here we've got some bone that's eroding out of the ground like this this whole spot there's a bone there's a bone the bone bone bone bone bone so dude that's insane man it's just like boom boom boom yeah no no go ahead go ahead you know a lot of people think when you come across a dinosaur bone you just find a whole dinosaur bone lying on the surface and it's perfectly intact and you can just carry it up and take it home and don't get me wrong sometimes it does happen but it's very few and far between normally you just find these large sections and you have to trace back to where it's coming from and you find the source and you pull out the large section of the bone that's still in good condition and then we piece this stuff back together it's kind of like an ancient puzzle I guess you could say but as you get deeper into the lair this is what gives us a good sign hey we need to dig right here and as we get deeper into the lair the bones will be a lot better preserved they haven't been exposed to air yet they haven't been exposed to winter summer rain everything involved with the elements and so this is just a good sign of hey guys we're on the right track we got some bones on the surface here we're gonna get a machine and start to scrape this all away and hopefully find where this is coming that so are you so when you get a spot like this where you've got bone all coming out what would you do would you start working into the hillside so what we'd really want to do try to figure out okay so what kind of a layer is this so we collect all these pieces get them out of the way you know make sure we don't lose any of them then we start to brush all of this away and try to look for symmetrical patterns in the rock itself you want to try to see you okay are these layers laying horizontal you know if they're aligned horizontal okay then what angle are they going out for the opposite direction so if they're running this way are the layers going down at a 45 degree angle running this way or they going down at a 90 degree angle running this way and they can't happen sometimes bones just go straight into the ground right and so which makes it difficult you know for every foot you go down you got to move three foot wide right yeah yeah so here's something I was curious also is how did these bones get here I mean are we you know is this is this an ancient riverbed or is this any video what do we got going on here analysis this layer here in this particular layer this is actually an ancient brackish swamp so I mean it's a swamp of fresh water and salt water so ed so that so the coastal barrier I guess you could say was you know few hundred miles away from here so but when the tide would come in absolutely East but when the tide would come in is still push a lot of these swamps and it still kind of fill up with some saltwater too so that's where you find brackish oysters out here brackish gastropods all sorts of little invertebrates that live in both salt and freshwater and same with the same with the plant life too a lot of the dinosaurs walk through these swamps sometimes get stuck in the muck and then they die in petrify but not petrified would die and preserve right there in the swamp well sometimes they get attacked by a meat-eater right here in the swamp to you so you really won't look forward to know you're in an ancient cretaceous swamp is what's called these caliche balls here clichy balls are a cretaceous sediment from swamps back in a day so if you start to see those big balls coming out of the ground here you're you're you're you're in pretty good form because you're on you're on top of the cretaceous swamp and you could find material in there so after you find those you definitely want to start looking for bone jokes that's your key sign is is this stuff right here these little caliche balls and they are literally all over the place so all right so you get to a spot like this you decide you're gonna dig in and you start digging in you've got a spot that you've been working on on further on absolute can wait can we take everybody and go chart so literally there's stuff everywhere we walked probably 20 feet and a man bit down was like what's going on here what what is this 20 feet away from our other dinosaur we had we got another dinosaur right here what the heck's going on this is the looks like the distal end of a big metatarsal toboe and this we've been running down towards the toes in a foot um so the metatarsals are these big bones and the bridges right there absolutely so dinosaurs had three of them going down and then it would led to the little toes and eventually to the clause or the uncles basically okay so this is just a big partial toe this probably would've been to a duck-billed dinosaur a Hydra sore up here in the to medicine the Hydra stores are there Maiasaura or hypocracy or those are the two most popular ones now my asuras interesting species because that's the only speech of dinosaur that they scientifically know for a fact cared for its young I'm just pretty cool absolutely you're dead on dude science isn't especially the Montana State fossil as well that's which is absolutely great it's a very notable dinosaur for paleontology you know to actually prove that the dinosaur had the cognitive recognition to take care of its children after birth that is absolutely fans right and just once dumb lizards walking around that would abandon their tact that they were just and that's what's interesting is as you know is you've got these animals throughout these millions of years of history showing the same trait in care for their young as you know animals do today that's now I'm looking down right down here that's another so that's another piece of bone and that's another piece of bone that is insane 20 feet away from say this is this part of the greater point that we're trying to explain to you guys is that dinosaur fossils aren't rare they're everywhere okay you just gotta know where to go look and that's what a man does is he knows where to go what that he goes find it which is why there's there's there's dinosaurs here dude a lot of people seem to think that looking for dinosaurs is reserved for a certain class of academia yes you could say but really as long as you go through the proper channels you do it on private land and you ask permission you know anyone can really do it and you can get really into it it can be a really healthy activity it's a lot of fun you bring up a very good point is that you you out there watching this right now if you want to you can go do this you can come do this all you've got to do is is you've got to have the drive and the desire to want to come out here and the work ethic to want to come out here and discover this stuff you can be anything you want to be you want to go dig dinosaurs for a living like me I don't I don't have the intelligence do you know I want to be a history teacher but I couldn't graduate from college so I just started doing this and now I'm teaching so you can do the exact same thing if you want to dig for dinosaurs you can do this you just gotta have the drive and the desire and you will learn along the way and that's so cool that's very fan it's very fun yes yeah I don't know I think that everyone has their Drive everyone has their you know thing that they wish that they could be doing there's nothing stopping you from doing it that's really isn't that's dude there's nothing stopping you from doing it that's awesome so you know you've got the stuff exposed up top and you think well let's dig down let's see what we got so what's the next step you know you're doing it by hand and you're opening up this what we got going on here this is a lot going on you want to try to find as a site that has the most concentration of bones on the surface this spot hands down for this particular ranch has been the most concentration of loans on the surface so you start at the very top of the ridge essentially right and you want to look for bones that are just coming out of the ground may either be a large chunk or else could be a large section of a limb just popping on the ground right hey you start to expose it and so you're going in by hand and just pick and shovel and just cutting down absolutely absolutely and you know here's something wild if you look you can see this this whole ridge line this whole formation look look across here guys you see that patch over there that's a continuous of the formation you see that next ridge beyond it that's the continuous to the fort so it's this layer is still going that it's insane so right so you're in him you're picking it by hand what's and you get when you get to the point where it's just like dude I need I need the big guns so the layers will kind of dive and dip differently in the hillside so in this case the hill is at an angle like this but the layers come down at an angle like this so once you start to move this over burn up top every foot you want to go down you got to move everything off the back - so in this case you can see where we've moved everything down by hand you know and then the layer itself is starting to dip really heavily into the hillside itself so we need to give a scenery in here to start to expose all of this and they start to expose the good bones that have been deeply preserved underground for a long long and doesn't better quality bone right absolutely so then your next step is is to call somebody like ty absolutely come on here for a second so so you're you call titled like dude I've hit a spot I need some big guns will you in the call type I shows up what do you do I just had a lot more experience running equipment is it basically all I do I mean we're gonna study this look at it I mean you can see the layers going in at 25 degree angle yeah so as that goes in you can see how much dirt he's pulled off by hand already right but if he wants to go a foot deeper here he's got to dig a foot deep all the way out there I go foot deeper so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take the backhoe we're gonna come in here we're gonna pull hold that overburden off 1012 feet down so he's got a great big clean shelf that he can work on and then peel that layer off okay as he goes down it's just like pages of book then he'll be able to open these pages of the book and just and and keep going and follow those in without having to spend two days shoveling for one page right and that's basically how if you're gonna quarry anything no matter what fossil is that's pretty much what you do yeah I mean yeah you've got to get the overburden off I mean there's always dirt that you don't walk that doesn't have anything in it right that you need to get out of the way there's I mean there's other things that you have to watch out for when we're doing that I mean we try to be good land stewards we don't want to make a big runoff mess we don't want a bunch of overburden and silt and stuff washing down into the creek there's a beautiful will Creek down here we're gonna build a little catch basin to catch all that and in 20 years from now the farmer will love us because that one's going to be the greenest spot on the whole mountain right well it's it's like anything when you're on private property and you're out there doing this you know you want to take care of them I mean it's just it's what you do it's just being good people so all right well we're let you guys get to work we're gonna we're gonna be here for a couple days and we'll kind of show you guys the progress aiming this is insane dude so what do we got going on here y-you know we've been down there working on that spot down there kind of change tactics moved up here this is a really big bone the proximal end actually looks like it came off we have the proximal end we just don't have it here for the shot yet but oh this is a big ol nough bone it's a lower arm bone to a head Packers or dinosaur my packer store is a big Lambeosaurus a duck-billed dinosaur they got about 35 feet long here in the two minutes and they're absolutely really nice dinosaurs a big crown crest on the top of there oh that's good so this is actually where we found a partial skeleton now the scout team consisted primarily of the pelvic bones in an upper tail and a little bit of the lower limb bones so it's really nice to see that now we're getting into the front limb bone so if they're going to find more of this if you look right here so we got another bone going in right here this looks like a process to a vertebra probably and then the centrum disk should be somewhere within this rock so count our lucky stars we came back to this site textmate once more because there should be a lot more of this animal oh it's great can you tell which way it's facing is it face and face down well you know for what we seen so far the tail is actually running down this way and primarily and right where you're at is where we had big sacrum first that's the vertebrates that sit on top of the pelvic bone so we removed all those guys out we just didn't go down far enough apparently so that's why this stuff is always worth coming back and checking that's always worth coming back even when you think you're done you're not done and then when you think you're done that time you're still not done alright guys what we wanted to do is we wanted to bring you guys out to what Amon is trying to complete over at the other site 30 miles away so this this this is what a dinosaur quarry looks like and what he's trying to get together over there with the backhoe and the equipment and everything like that so what's your what's your goal here dude what do we got going on so what we have is about 20 feet total and some pretty massive overburden it's a lot of fresh water centering they got washing from the Glacial movements so we want to get this all this right up here is all the overburden so we want to work way down below that to the yellow layers that's an iron stone that iron is a really slow moving River channel we won't really find much material in that so we got to go even deeper than that to the hard iron rock that you see all sorts a little pebble rocks in that shows really high energy a really big massive flash flood had to come through here and washed a lot of dinosaurs into like a log jam deposit I guess he's so light so like stuff like this down here see this pebbly stuff down here this is what he's going for all right this is evidence where you had a big wash down come in and bring down gravel and bigger river set and also bones as well so and you can see the difference in the upper layer right above it it would supersoft no pebbles whatsoever so here yeah layer so what kind of geologic event is going on that was more than likely a big flash flood honestly and so millions and millions and millions of gallons of water kept washing in all at once and just took out herds and herds and herds of dinosaurs for miles actually so what we do is we split these rocks into layers and as you flip the rock you look underneath of it you look for the impression of the bone if not the actual bone itself oh so okay sometimes you can flip it and there's a big hole big hole limb bone like a femur or a tibia whose teeth and claws I mean there can be all sorts of really good stuff in these ways yes and it is absolutely fantastic nice and so you're hoping that so so when you chisel and pop on it you get stuff like this absolutely this is what he's going for that is dinosaur bone in the rock right there and you see all the gravelly River sediment stuff around it like Amon was saying you know that's evidence of a giant flash flood that that that came down at that time and washed everything everybody and covered everybody up and so millions and millions of years how many millions of years we'll be dealing with 774 point 2 million years later a man's out here he's prospecting on this look that's a drop off that is that is insane Lee crazy down there so he's stamping on the ledges and stuff looking for these this gravelly petal layer and once he finds it he comes in with machinery like we're doing over at the other side and he's taking all that 20 feet of overburden off to get down to this layer right here and then popping it open and then you get dinosaur bones dad not so freaking cool dad it's awesome man this is how dinosaur bones are discovered you know it's not like you know out in the middle and it's just you walk and pulled there's a whole dinosaur it doesn't happen like that you know most dinosaurs that you see in museums and stuff you know they're put together you know that whole skeleton is put together from many many many many many different animals same species but many different animals you know a leg here armed there and they put it all together very rarely do you get the entire skeleton laying out so what Heyman's doing is he's going and he's hunting for you know these isolated bones and that's what he's doing over at the other side so he walked around and that's what we showed you early you walked around he saw where there was good stuff coming out and he wanted to create the same situation he's got here over there where you take all the overburden off and then all you got is is you you're literally walking on these pebbly layers and he just oh cool that's how it goes that's so awesome dude that's so cool man alright so we're at here we came to another place that a man's got opened up out here what do we got going on dude what's what what kind of site is this well so this site has actually been pretty newly discovered this looks like it's turning into a little bit of a microsite so what's microsite me so a microsite is when you find smaller remains of the dinosaurs little toes over to rizal teeth it's usually a channel some sort of a smaller river flow that deposited everything in between a gas and barkas so you find long worthless or smaller enameling pieces okay so so what what Tony pick up so in this case our close friend Tony she found a beautiful beautiful uncle this is a foot claw to a hydrous or dinosaur you got the foot here that's a little thing coming off the side would have been would have been one of the claws going to the front Oh place anywhere in the very front of a foot okay so these are just absolutely this is out of this world this place is one of the best ones I've ever seen awesome morally wrong yeah more than likely there's only two real Hydra stores out here and one is actually a lamby Asur that's the high Packer stores that you saw in the other videos that were digging on the other site this looks very high dress or claw so our humble so I'd have to dare to say this is from a Maya sore it's the Montana State dinosaur lice flattened for mother lizard it's the only dinosaur approved took care of its young after birth and so coal species before you're also fine and stuff like deep down here we don't i picked this guy up now here's the thing about you know because dinosaurs you know we're like sharks they shed their teeth so that's kind of one of the reasons why you know you can come out and you can find just as many dinosaur teeth is because just like sharks they shed their teeth which is insane oh yeah so what did I find here so this is a beautiful beautiful Raptor tooth and this is actually hands-down one of the larger ones I've seen come out of the to medicine formation especially on this ranch in particular it's - that's so cool it's a raptor dude look at the serrations going down the back that is insane God if I were here 70 million this thing could eat me that's so cool day so what what species is it what's that species well I would like what you see in the movie there's only a couple of Raptor species here in the to medicine and they're nothing like what you see in the movies yeah most Raptors are actually feathered and what we see in Hollywood isn't quite accurate so the bigger species of Raptor that comes out to medicine is called a SAR ornithol st's it's a really long name and they stood about three and a half four feet tall and they're a completely feather that's so this is something special you got here chase good good job well no dude thank you for having us out on your site man it is so great Raptor dude that's so cool man that's it here this is a raptor - yeah you can see the indentations on either side so that would let up that's could be metatarsal but I think that's actually a lower toe and then in the other one here that is a huge party and that is that would have that's probably from a desk sweetest source it's too big to be from the other carnivores oh yeah that's cool Swedish store is a close relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex as you know that's awesome not literally thirty seconds after we just left you guys this showed back so we're gonna go find some more stuff so even what's going on here we've got like an entirely new hole there there's a hole back that away that we were working on and then we stopped and then went and we're go for it let's go on all so we pulled a couple of years ago we pulled a partial high pack resource skeleton out of this site the new site is just maybe a quarter mile a third mile down the way here but we came back to this old site here to see if there's any more of this animal and we're actually having quite a bit of luck the other day we found in Ola that's a lower arm bone and the start of a big rib so we decide to get machinery back in this spot really open it up and start trying to figure out where this lair runs and find more of this animal and we're having a lot of luck actually so what was the digging on the old site just a little bit too difficult for the machinery that we had right now we're trying to carve into the entire mountainside to make like a 15-foot wall so you just pop rocks off that wall and cover bones we're starting to realize though that the further deep you go the more concrete that stuff becomes I mean this layer in particular so we're gonna do instead is take the Machine attack it from the very top and you know just go from the top down it's nice and try that now that can be a little bit more time-consuming because as you find a bone you have to stop you know just dig it all out and then you can keep going so you know what you got is is you've got to utilize the time that you've got so you know you're attacking a spot and you hit ruffle rocks it's in it that you can't really get to it gotta take some time step back and see another way to attack that spot like that site over there we were we first started filming so he knew he found a whole dinosaur here at one point and he wanted to come back and see what the rest of it was there so he popped over came here popped a hole ain't find it all finding all kinds of stuff man come here let me show you what what our cameraman Isaac pulled out of the ground we got here it's a nice vertebra a couple pieces were broken on it when a pop saw which is not unusual I mean there's always fracturing in the ground that's awesome so what species is this is this the same species as what you were so this is the rest of the animal they're only got about 250 to go how much more is in here you know honestly this is my son kind of silly but we mostly found the but last time all the pelvic bones the upper tail on the lower back so it's all going down into the mouth that's all running this way and going straight down too so we have a lot more ribs to find we've a lot more lower tail vertebrae all the next vertebrae four bones exposed the you can see most dinosaurs me find them they're just a big jumble pile of bone you know they get washed into a spot you know you might find a femur up to the rib cages you never know but in this case it's semi articulated the bones are mostly flipped upside down and we're seeing lower tail and a certain section lower back in a certain section upper body a certain section but there are a few bones that kind of float away here and there yeah so you know what's interesting about this site that you've got out here is you've got multiple opportunities you know you get hung up in one spot you can go check out another spot see if you get hung up in that spot you can go and walk around on the surface and pick up on the surface humming this is an awesome freaking sight is this the way the to medicine normally is you know the to medicine is very hit and miss 90% of the bones were found in what's called the upper formation of the two medicine and there is layers that are indeed master mortality so that's what we're really after is trying to find a site that's a mass mortality site where you just find a bunch different bones from a bunch of different species now mass mortality would that have been caused by you know a flood or vomit or in this case in this case it's a massive massive freshwater flood okay it's a big one a really big one that wiped out probably a good hundred square miles or so Wow this big one they have any idea what caused those giant flood you know it really could be the same as what's going on today otherwise therapy it's really hard to say it could have been tsunami and which I wouldn't be freshwater but it could have been I really about a hurricane that came through especially since you know the oceanfront at this point in time was only a couple hundred miles to the east of us and that's an interesting point you know they during this time the entire center part of the continent the United States was was where the ocean came up through so yeah it could and that could've been her absolutely who knows I mean there's a lot of different things that play here for what kind of brought in just a massive flash flood so we're uncovering right now it's a few different bones here they're down there working right now on lower tail vertebrae and rib sections that's going to lower half of the body and we did find big sacrum vertebrae that's this vertebrae that sit right on top the pelvic bones right on top of the butt and as we've gone up this way we found more ribs and dorsal vertebrae so their lower back vertebrae and the processes on those stand straight up so that's how you can tell what are the back you're on is based on the processes if they're up by a 90-degree angle or so tapering down the tail into 45-degree angles and then heading up even further into this way you find more dorsal processes we got some sort of bone right here we found an ulnar and then right here we're working on a scapula so that should be right up into the breast area now we're really hoping that this is gonna bring us that much further to find in the neck and in the skull so so which direction do you think the neck in the skull downward and hopefully tucked underneath the n1 let's call the dive position like this that's where the neck curls up into the body of the so are you gonna work all that by hand or with nice good luck brother [Music] see how the ball I'm trying to do is pop [Music] vertebrae attaches there so it's the top process to vertebra little flag that sticks up on top it's just hard to hold it all together and then it was naturally eroded off the talk missing off the top right there we still have the front zags get out all right so it's much later in the day this hole is expanded out like crazy Ty's been backhoe in it like mad and Amy's been working on his bone and he's got it totally exposed what dude what have we got going on here this is so cool so this is a big hype a curse word scapula that's a front collarbone based on the front side of the chest same species at what we've been dealing with okay so this is really big so this is a pretty fun bone come here check this out guys that is insane it so got a sword you can't get any close to a dinosaur than this man that is nuts so what'd you do to it once you fail the bone what was the process well reduce it sound so this 80 baby little top sticking out here that's been running away a little bit let's go have to be prepped and touched up here they just slowly have to work away this loose shale uh-huh manse it's a it's so it's a bit of a process the bone itself can't move so you work all the rock from in front of it away first and work up to the rock on the boat now why can't the bone move because it's just that it has these natural fractures okay so you don't want to extort those any further essentially you want to keep those as they are otherwise you risk damaging the bone the more you move those fractures and where they start to break and crumble rather than just weakens the joint part and then it also just kind of makes it more difficult to prep up nice man so what's your next what's your next process well the next step is to do what's called a pedestal we're gonna go around all of this and knock about an inch off inside here all around the entire bone okay and we're gonna go ahead and wrap it up in foil and then make a nice burlap jacket with a hydrocal plaster okay so you're gonna Jack it up and plaster it yep yep absolutely and what does that plaster jacket do what's the purpose of it besides just getting the bone the plaster jacket keeps it steady in place so it won't move whatsoever when it's inside the jacket ideally okay and then that way makes it safer for transportation keeps the whole bone in articulation as it is it's just a good move to keep it nice and protected what's your first step here protects the any kind of you know nice layers nice nice so you pull it and that creates a barrier between the plaster and the bone that can easily come off exactly this is the burlap itself okay it's nice strong stretchy burlap just standard Bartlett if it's porous so it's when the gypsum plaster hits it'll fill in all the cracks and this'll heart with this so that's why they use burlap and not of any other material yeah you know it really works well there's old coffee bean bags if you have a roaster nearby they work really well so you just cut them into strips yeah I cut them in a big long strips about out on two and a half three feet long or so and about 10 inches 8 inches wide so that's a little bit a lengthy process with a knife scissors work a lot better but it still works how many layers of burlap will you put on Oh for this one honestly just one or two okay now for a big thick phone we'd use five six seven sometimes would even do a piece of rebar on it or sit but in this case the bone is so light it's just really heavy on one end will really jacket the one end do a nice light jacket on the other nice yeah that's fun excited Pina hydrocal plaster it's a gypsum-based plaster so it's really hard really quickly so you got to keep it in motion if you go on it to setup so way to do if you want to mix it you wanna make some tour it gets nice and nice and soupy and blah P no if it's too watery it won't set very quickly it'll difficult to work with nice yeah fun stuff so after you get it mixed up like that starts soaking the burlap in it yep absolutely will roll the burlap into it and make each strip these be just cover it in and then we'll slab it on the bone there and we'll start to sculpt it and let it dry about 20 minutes out of the major plaster put it on the bone on top of that foil there so the plaster picks up a lot of it so you want to waste it so you gotta ring it out and make sure it gets into every single pore in the plaster you catch all the access and your bucket there this is the messy part now this one already covers most of the bone here so I have to make too big of a jacket luckily and you gotta wait for each layer to dry no you can lay it on top of itself let it all dry up at the same time then you want to go ahead and sculpt it and mold it to fit on the bone I'm gonna cook it all around it so kind of cups the bone make sure it's nice and flush up against it there's no pockets or anything where the bone could crack and crumble all right one down and so how do you know how many layers of plaster Union is heavier ends of the bone need more plaster you know ideally like paleontology MacPhail ecologists would make it into just one big blob basically and they take probably more make sure matrix with it than I would some so they use a lot of a lot of plastic she's got to do I feel base on parts of the bone you know are weak parts of the bone you know are heavier than other parts of going that whitter is snapping you know so I'm just really reinforce everything as best as you can so is this the same method that's been around since the beginning of paleontology you know some paleontologists bet way back in the day actually use dynamite to get bones out of the ground so there definitely has been some primitive methods for a very long time but they've started they've obviously have come around for a while now you know that's pretty wild to think that the exact same method to wrap dinosaurs when all this started out is still being used today that is pretty wide open based plaster existed back then I'm sure that something very close to it did yeah but I'm sure they use something very similar in sine AG's burlap make these big jackets you can see all historical photos of them [Music] perfect nice see the bone underneath a shirt you don't wall make sure you don't lose any corners don't always just pop just like that Wow it's over or under burden off here and this phone so when you get it back you'll prep it all out in the jacket well start doing it's getting all this under burden off here to expose the bone itself they'll take a dremel tool and cut this entire jacket off and flip it over and get a get the jacket out of there and then the real prep can begin put some blue in this areas that are fragile you can see see the free roots yeah this is pretty common these plants will attack this this is several feet under the ground and you could see this web of groups yep that was eating into that bone so really in a couple of years I mean even if even they don't even make it at the surface before the break yeah yeah they're already broke they're already breaking up before they hit the surface between the freeze-thaw and the plants and the rodents and everything else see they get broke up real fast so we've been fortunate enough and blessed enough to have Eamon towed us all over the sites that he's got going on in Montana and dude we started up this process we wanted to show you guys what it was like when a fossil quarry gets opened up and the whole process of you know discovering dinosaur bones and everything like that and it was interesting as heck because you know we started in a and we ended up with B and we got all kinds of cool C and I mean it was just all over the place and that's kind of really what fossil hunting is yeah yeah you have things I've been expected a lot of things I'm going to plan so you just have to adjust and you know kind of figure it out I guess but you know what's neat about you know you you would found a dinosaur here you know a large part of a skeleton we'd started off I kind of trying to open a spot down over there hit some really hard rock said well let's go check out just checking to just check it out yeah we found out this dirt was so awesome and smooth and loose in so chock full of bones I mean you've got I've got this huge awesome home full of nothing but tennis or bones to dig now yeah I know soon as it weathers out a sheet of softer and softer and easier process for dad it's so cool dude well hey listen I really want to thank you for having us laws really appreciate it thank you guys for tuning in just remember how do you know where you're going unless you know reven it's and studying and understanding the mistakes the past that preventive failures the future be sure to LIKE and subscribe the video that you see here check us out on facebook at chasing history and on YouTube at the Challenger never ever ever be on twitter twitter is evil it's awful it's bad bad twitter it's never

Channel: Chasing History

Views: 7,245

Rating: 4.65625 out of 5

Keywords: American dinosaurs, American fossil hunting, Chase Pipes, Chasing History, Digging dinosaurs, Digging fossils, Discovering dinosaurs, Fossil hunting, Montana dinosaurs, Montana fossils, Two Medicine Formation, Two Medicine dinosaurs, dino hunter, dinosaur, dinosaur documentary, dinosaur hunter, dinosaur hunters, dinosaur hunters documentary, dinosaurs for kids, mt, paleontology, the history guy

Id: l3nffH_pV-E

Length: 51min 25sec (3085 seconds)

Published: Fri May 03 2019