It was brutally hot today, but we still got about eight hours on site. We widened the pit a bit this morning, and successfully flipped and removed yesterday’s dentary jacket. We also removed one of the small vertebrae from the east side of the pit, which turned out to be a small odontocete lumbar vertebra (above).
While the west side of the pit had been more productive the last few days, today we were finding much more on the east side of the pit. James found a possible third vertebrae among those uncovered yesterday, while Courtland found a nice Aetobatus tooth:
Later is the day Courtland made another, more impressive find: an articulated series of fish vertebrae:
Here are the outlined vertebrae:
The vertebra at the bottom was found a couple of centimeters away from the others, and has a somewhat different shape, so I’m not positive it’s part of the series (I’ve moved it into line with the others in this picture). But it is the same diameter as the others. However, the other three were found in articulation, and the third one (at the top) is still in the ground, so there is a possibility that there are more in the series.
These are quite a bit smaller than the vertebra I reported a few days ago, and they don’t appear to be from a tuna, but I don’t know which taxon they represent.
Updates from the Paleontology Lab 