Fieldwork in Clarens

Hi everyone, it's Jonah here. I'm just back from a trip doing fieldwork in Clarens, a quaint little artist's town near the Lesotho border. I was excavating fossils with my graduate student Blair. You may remember from my Facebook posts that Clarens is where Father Time lives...

But it's also the home of one of the best German restaurants in South Africa, a place called Roter Hahn.

Blair and I stayed in town, at a charmer called the Wynott Country House. Like most South African "self-caterings" it had a thatched porch out back with a grill and relatively spacious rooms.

 

 

Blair and I were excavating the remains of a large sauropod dinosaur nicknamed the "Highland Giant".

The field site is one of the more irritating places I've worked, as it's on the side of a cliff of crumbly, slippery mudstone.

When we first got to the fossil, it was mostly covered in rubble (below). About an inch below the rubble was incredibly hard rock, which required a rocksaw to remove. Rocksawing all day gives you sexy muscles, but it also gives you raccoon eyes and sandcastle boogers.

Of course it wasn't all bad. You may remember I posted the view into Lesotho from the quarry in September:

Now that view looks like this:

We were joined in the field by two local tour guides (a college guy and his Mom), who were indispensable. Look for his mother's umbrella below: