I'm wrapping up 2014, the year I broke all other travel records I previously had, by getting ready to head off to Kyrgyzstan for ten months. "Ten months!" my mother wails in the background... I assure her the internet truck does in fact go to Kyrgyzstan and thus the creation of this blog. I’m a late 20’s native of the Pacific Northwest attending graduate school at University of Oregon. I have a master’s degree in vertebrate paleontology looking at a 16+ million year old ecosystem in Oregon and now I’m working on a PhD on the younger (geologically speaking) fossils of Kyrgyzstan.
My Oregon field site, Hawk Rim (paper in submission!)
As with any overseas research project, the hardest part is getting there, so when one of my best friends from undergrad recommended applying for a Fulbright, I did, and here I am getting ready to take advantage of the amazing experience the Fulbright to Kyrgyzstan provides. For those who don’t know me, I am not the world’s most organized person. Thus, two days after Christmas I’m scrambling to pack my room, pack my suitcases, photograph my existing fossils, and amass all the references I need to write papers and do research in another country! I’m at least going in with the advantage of having spent several weeks in Kyrgyzstan doing research last summer. I have a place to stay in Bishkek (the capitol) when I get there, so I’ll spend my first few months working on preparing the fossils I left there on my last trip.
The view from where I will be staying in Bishkek. Note the tall (14,000 feet) peaks of the Kyrgyz Range rising in the background. The sharp contrast from flat to hills is a massive thrust fault putting the city in a earthquake hazard zone (note the huge Soviet style block buildings).
Once the weather warms up and some of the snow melts I’ll be out doing fieldwork! I have at least been organized enough to order some fossil prep materials including a polymer called Butvar b-90, which will hopefully prevent a repeat of the “great 2014 glue catastrophe”. When fossils are found, they are often in pretty rough shape.
Fossil above the green dental pick is a metapodial (hand bone) from a fossil horse called Hipparion. Note it's broken in many places...
Even if you are lucky enough to find whole bones, or even more rarely, a skeleton, they tend to be very broken and only held together by the surrounding rock. This is especially the case with the Kyrgyz fossils, as the rocks they are in have tons of faults as well as clay mineral replacement. Knowing this, I use a dilute form of polymer as a consolidant. Last summer I brought plastic bottles, polymer plastic beads wrapped up ready-to-dissolve, and figured I’d get some acetone in Kyrgyzstan as my solvent. Well it turns out some people apparently use acetone in bombs, and thus you can’t get it in a pure lab grade form… I tried. I really tried. $100 later I had a brown glass bottle sealed with wax delivered in a plastic bag. There were numerous chemical formulas written on the outside, with the clearest one saying “CCl”. That is not the formula for acetone. When I went ahead and tried to make consolidant, it certainly didn’t smell like nail polish remover. The polymer did start to dissolve, but not as rapidly or as well as it should have. Whatever concoction I made more importantly only sort of held together fossils. While better than nothing, it took far more of it, and very little penetrated into the bone as planned. Many of the fossils did not come out of the ground, or back to the states well as a result. So this year I have “glue” that is soluble in pure alcohol and is even semi soluble in water. You know what THAT means? If I have to, I can just use vodka. It’s a lot cheaper and very readily available!