Day 7- Tattler Creek

The day before, Paleontology had been up  Tattler Creek to look at fossil dinosaur  footprints. We decided to do the same today.  It was a beautiful canyon, with lots of cool  geology. We looked at a rhyolite sill, which  is a horizontal intrusion of magma. Derek climbed up  a small scree  slope to look at it. While he was up there,  I filmed a short segment of him explaining  it and sliding down the hill, although it  eventually had to be cut because of time  constraints.

We were walking up the stream when a dog came running down the path. Or, that's what I  thought it was, until I realized that there  was no one behind it. It was actually a coyote, and it just walked  right past us, about 10 feet away, and  continued on its trip, unfazed by out  presence.

At the same spot, we saw two streams that  came together (picture above). One was just  a normal, clear stream, but the other was  yellow. The rocks on the bottom all had a  coating, probably of a calcium carbonate. It  was a pretty cool example of sediment  deposition by streams.

We finally reached our destination, which  was along a stream. The dinosaur footprints had been made in mud, and the fossil was a cast of that imprint, meaning they stuck out of  the rock face.

In the left-hand picture, I’m pointing at a hadrosaur track, the right hand a therapod.
The rock had been transformed and shifted,  as the face now sat upright, with a dip of  about 80 degrees. These were therapod  tracks, which were usually the carnivores.  We also saw hadrosaur tracks which are  usually plant eaters. The hadrosaur (plant  eaters) tracks were more blobular, while the  therapods had distinct toes.

A picture of a Therapod, plus a simple drawing of my idea of the difference.
We filmed a segment here, then headed back  down. That night Derek and Dirck, from  paleontology, went swimming in the river again. We also filmed a segment where Emily used the X-Ray Analyzer and explained it. Afterwards we did a photo shoot of her holding the Niton and a can of bear spray, silhouetted by the setting sun. I guess it was supposed to have a western theme.

(I’m second from the left, in XtraTufs)