Hi All! Well where do I start? After years of watching Jurassic Park and learning about Paleontology, I get to spend my internship actually doing it! I am working with Ryan O’Dell out of the Hollister field office and get to work on excavation and prep of one of the specimens found on BLM land in the Panoche Hills. I had a lot of fun at the beginning of my internship working with Ryan and Kelly to excavate the specimen and transport it to the lab. Now I spend my days slowly removing the sediments from the plaster jacket that we encased the specimen in to reveal what is inside! Some days the work is very slow but it is also rewarding as I uncover new portions of the fossils. As I continue through my internship I will work on identifying each fossil that I remove from the jacket after I clean them up and possibly even write a research paper on the findings! Stay tuned for more information 🙂 I have been having a really good time on my internship and am so grateful that I could be part of this program!

Talk to you soon,

Susan Bowman
Paleontology intern
BLM, Hollister

Here is the jacket in the lab

This is the opened jacket, you can see some fossils on top of the sediments.

This is a really cool perfectly preserved Ammonite that I found in the sediment.