Today started with some ecological fieldwork at Olduvai Transect II, which encompasses a semi-wooded area with a watering hole that’s active during the wet season. It also overlaps with Maasai herding grounds, so we met a lot of goats (and kids)! Our aim was to get a general sense of animal density at increasing distances from the watering hole by measuring dung abundance.
Afterwards, we visited Shifting Sands, which is a singular sand dune that is currently blowing across the plains. You might be wondering why the sand doesn’t just disperse in the wind: it clumps together because it has a high iron concentration and is magnetic. Some iron even separated out from the sands on my phone. There are markers for where the dune is on the landscape each year so you can see how far it‘s traveled.
We did some more work on the fossilized animal teeth we found yesterday. Using the Olduvai Museum’s exhibits as a comparative collection, we were able to identify them and then compile the group’s data to see abundance and diversity of species found. From this, we’re able to infer the habitat of the specific site at that time. This was in Bed I, and we decided that it was a mostly open grassland environment with a water source, based on the prevalence of grazing species and Reduncini (my taxa group!). Of course, other methods, which we’ll be exploring later, are needed to get more information to recontruct the paleoenvironment.
I gave my method presentation on phytoliths and pollen, after which Dr. Dominguez Rodrigo shared more about his current research using phytoliths at Olduvai. We watched the sunset over Castle Rock, the iconic pillar in the middle of the gorge. You can see different layers that represent different time periods. The bright red layer is from when the region was a tropical rainforest (a looong time ago).
If you ever find yourself wandering about outside the Olduvai Museum around dusk, expect to run into several dik-dik!
Sifting shifting sands,
Carina
