This morning, the professor from UNC Greensboro offered to take four students along to assist with his field work. Marlo, McKenna, Caroline, and I threw elbows and burned bridges to get in on his project. Not actually, but we did get the opportunity to tag along with Dr. Charles and his PhD student, Alaz, to survey for bones.
They are running a longitudinal study to understand how environment influences predation, conducting annual surveys of the bones left within pre-determined regions. Throughout the day, we flagged the position of 186 bones and used a GPS Total Station to record the 3-dimensional coordinates of every fragment we encountered. While surveying, we were briefly joined by a Maasai pastoralist with his many goats:
Dr. Charles, McKenna, Marlo, and the Goats
As we discovered bones, Dr. Charles would identify what we had found and which side was facing up. To the untrained eye (me), bone fragments out of their skeletal context all look quite similar: chalky and broken. I was absolutely astonished with some of the identifications Dr. Charles was able to make with just a quick glance at the specimens. Genuinely incredible.
PhD Student Alaz Using the Total Station
We worked all morning, collecting each bone as we went along. We gathered bones by the bucket-full until resorting to an overflow pile. During our search, we came across the axial skeleton of a young wildebeest. Identifying and recording the position of every individual bone in such a large mammal was incredible but quite tedious. Rest in peace, though.
Flagged Wildebeest Bones
We then returned to camp for lunch and some rest. Some of the other students and I spent our break making friendship bracelets — I totally understand why kids love it so much. It was unnecessarily fun.
After our break, we returned to the museum so we could get the opportunity to finish identifying our teeth from yesterday. Eventually, Dr. Manuel gathered a list of each species represented by our tooth collections. Most animals living in the area 1.5 million years ago seemed to be grazing ungulates. There were very few browsers nearby, and only evidence of a single lion (shoutout large felids). Using our understanding of species’ behaviors and ecological trends, we were able to correlate the presence of each animal to an environmental setting. Ultimately, we determined that the gulley used to be an extremely open grassland surrounding a river 1.5 million years ago. Dr. Manuel confirmed this conclusion.
It was very cool to apply my understanding of ecology and environmental science with a completely novel field of study. I never realized how critical ecology is to understanding earth’s past, rather than just its present and future. I was also impressed by the sheer amount of knowledge that science has enabled us to discern from just a few bones – teeth, at that.
We returned to camp for dinner and bed after another successful day in Africa. Goodnight and sweet dreams!
