I’m Dr. Cary Woodruff, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at Frost Science. Take a step into my office with this monthly blog series, and let’s dig deeper.
We’re into the first few weeks of the dig season, but as usual, Montana is being its unpredictable self. The state had an extremely mild winter, so there was almost no snow or spring rain in this part of the state–meaning when I first got out here; everything was dry as a bone and already in extreme drought conditions.
But the extreme weather was only just beginning…
On Mother’s Day, it was 95°, and the following week, we got hit by an honest-to-gosh dust storm! But wouldn’t you know, only a few days after the dust storm, the temperature plummeted to the mid 20°s, and I even woke up to a light dusting of snow one morning! Then came the rain… Over the course of two weeks, some parts of the state up here got almost their year-to-date rainfall totals. There was even nearly a solid week where it rained so much that we couldn’t go out and dig.
Even with the episodes of extreme weather, we have been able to start work at our primary objective for the summer. In 2024, we found parts of an ankylosaur (pronounced ang-kai-low-sore; these are the armored dinos). We couldn’t excavate it because there was a steep hill with lots of rock above it. So, what do we do then? Well, you can either get a big crew, and with pickaxes and shovels, you can spend weeks to months removing it all by hand. Or… you can rent an excavator.
I spent two days carving the hill away and digging down to a safe layer above where the bones were, and we’ve just started to carefully uncover the bones we reburied in 2024 by hand. We don’t know how much of the skeleton may be there; maybe loads more, maybe not a single other bone–but that’s part of the fun! Like opening a present on Christmas morning, we get to ‘unwrap’ this surprise and see what’s ‘inside.’ And remember to follow along all summer as we’ll post updates on what we’re finding and how the dig’s going.
Using an excavator to remove the rocky hillside above the site | Frost Science’s Fossil Preparator, Dan Large, with the exposed ankylosaur bones we first found in 2024. Dan’s favorite dinosaurs are the ankylosaurs, so he’s especially happy.