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| Science in progress. Burpee Museum (Rockford, IL), October 7, 2014. |
Left at 8:30-
Scenes from the road:
~A man standing in a grassy median/His jacket is a cocoon of
tight green wire/His feet nose the road's last deer/the shadow back bronzes into a
secondary sunrise/Pulls a phone from the jacket to his ear/Three russet plumes
of leaf bonfires~
-arrived at 9:30
10:45 am: I’ve finished writing up the paired set of cervical ribs.
I then spent some time double checking the sequence of the rest
of the cervicals and numbered them with a new set of Post It notes. I then resumed writing up the remaining ribs (there are two to
go – I am presently writing up Cervical rib E). I covered a lot more ground
during the previous visit than I remembered.
11:03 am: IL and CO removed the left dorsal ribs from the
mount and brought them down to where I am working in the collections. I expect
that I’ll reach the dorsals today.
11:56 am: We leave for lunch; just before that I was siding
the last cervical rib, which appears to be from the right side. The capitulum
is snapped off and the anterior end of the cranial process is damaged, and the
degree of bilateral symmetry is extreme (unlike the preceding ribs), which briefly threw
me.
12:54 pm: Back to the ribs!
2:06 pm: I finished writing up the last free cervical rib (Cervical
rib G), but there are a few loose ends: I still have to photograph several of them
in multiple views, and I have to compare my rib descriptions with those of
Brochu (2003) and Brusatte et al. (2012) to fill any holes in the description.
I’ve started writing up the left dorsal rib 1, but it nags
at me that its complement is preserved and is attached to the skeleton upstairs. I leave the collections room to check the
gallery; indeed, the first dorsal is there on the right side, and it is more complete than the left bone that I
have started penning.
3:09 pm: Returned from the gallery with the first right dorsal rib in hand, which IL just removed for me.
4:07 pm: Microsoft Word just crashed when I copied a
heading, “Osteological correlates, ligaments”.
It takes a few minutes to reopen the program, open the file, and find my place.
Luckily, only two subheadings were lost in the crash; I save the document compulsively as I write to
minimize the cost of these frequent, frustrating, crashes. Luckily this is only crash today.
4:24 pm: I wrap up, having nearly completed the description
of the first dorsal rib, where I stopped after getting several paragraphs into “Osteological correlates, muscles”. The manuscript has reached 377
pages.
Left at 4:35 pm-
Scenes from the road:
~The sky is mitered by long, crushed
anvils/The full moon waxes oblate in a silent ascending drill~
References cited
Brochu, C.A.
2003. Osteology of Tyrannosaurus rex:
insights from a nearly complete skeleton and high-resolution computed
tomographic analysis of the skull. Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Memoir 7:
1-138.
Brusatte, S.
L., T.D. Carr, andM.A. Norell. 2012. The osteology of Alioramus, a gracile and long-snouted
tyrannosaurid (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia.
Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 366: 1-197.
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