Ultimate Dinosaur Hunting Guide Episode 3

Welcome to Episode 3 of our four-part Ultimate Dinosaur Hunting Guide. In Episode 2, the crew returned to the Montana Badlands, tracking ancient river channels and eroded hillsides in search of dinosaur fossils. Ty broke down how to read the geology, explaining redeposited sediment, layered host rock, and why only certain bands of earth preserve dinosaurs. Back at the main dig site, multiple bone layers began to emerge, revealing a dense mix of material washed together by prehistoric floods, with new ground opened and deeper layers now exposed. The story beneath this hillside is just beginning. The next day reminded the crew that the Badlands don't care about comfort. One day, it's summer. The next, it's winter. The wind's up, the cold's biting, and the dinosaurs aren't gonna dig themselves out. Ty's moving our spoil from yesterday off over the side. Our layer that we're digging with him starts right here. This whole edge that goes across, this is what we're digging. So this allows us to continue to dig down and have a place for our spoil to go and not have to hoof it, you know, over the edge because it's a lot of dirt. And doing it by hand, it wears you out really quickly. So we're really fortunate to have access to the machine up here. So, Ty, it can get really confusing digging this because, you know, we've got the layers that are, you know, you see the layers, you know where the layers are. But there's also other geological factors that are happening. What are those other factors? Yeah, one of the things that happens out here a lot people don't realize is it's called hillside slope. So the ground is moving all the time out here. These clays, these bentonite clays, every time it gets wet, it expands, dries, it shrinks. And so as it gets wet and dry and wet and dry and freeze and thaw and rain, it'll actually walk down the hill. That's so cool! You have these bones that come out and will actually get broken off, walk the way down the hill, and they're even exposed. So a lot of this material that you see on the surface out here, it's too late. By the time you see it, it's too late. It's already destroyed. So one of the things you can see here on this quarry is, if you look at this top layer where they're sitting and working, you can see that pebble layer, and it comes around. But if you look right here, take this for a dive, and you can see this layer suddenly just drops like this out here. That's not layer getting deeper. That is, you see this little basin? Why it's a little bit steeper on this edge? This entire basin has slid down the hill. So any bones in this have a good chance of being damaged, broken up, destroyed already, so it's slid down the hill, and the ground has moved recently, not in geologic past. That's one thing to keep in mind about erosion, is that erosion is a process that is continuing literally every single minute of every single day. Even with the wind blowing like it is, it's still moving the sand, it's moving the dirt, it's moving any type of rain. And these processes happen really slowly, but in geological times, it's actually pretty quickly. That's how you can get fossils that are supposed to be in one layer, ended up way down and off to the side of another layer. So when you go to find stuff, how do you know when you're in the slump compared to when you're in a layer that you know you're going to always hit? Well, I mean, a lot of it, the first thing is you look at just the surface. If it's got nice, pretty clean layers, you know it's usually not been moved. When they start getting jumbled and mottled and mixed together, it's a good indication that they're mixed together. You look around this whole basin, you can see everything's pretty horizontal, pretty flat, but yet this one section here is tipped down different than the rest of them, so odds are it slid down and moved down. How thick is the hill creek formation? I think it goes up to about 700 feet in some areas. So it's 700 feet thick in some areas. And so we're basically in a river channel. Yeah, we're just one small sliver of that whole... This is one small sliver of that whole thing. We're in a river channel. So theoretically, this could go down 600 feet of these different sanity beds. Yeah, if you had a river that stayed in the same channel and filled up the same way, you know, that's what would happen. But what happens is you get these rivers that you have a braided stream and it flooded and it put all these animals and buried all this stuff and well, a thousand years from now, a river comes through and cuts through and actually eats that away. So you'll have a pretty channel here full of holes and it'll just abruptly end where another river actually eats into it and wash it all away. It could be a million years later. Right. So, I mean, it can change drastically. Our perception of time is so minute, guys. It's insane. Just to give you an example, we are closer in time to a T-Rex than a T-Rex is to a Stegosaurus. Okay, I know. Isn't that crazy? And so these layers represent all of those different types. We're just looking at one small step in one small place. You know, how many square miles is the Hill Creek? I mean, it covers five states. It's in about five states. So we're in one little dot. It's hundreds of thousands of square miles. We're in one little dot in five states worth of a formation. And how many bones have we pulled out in just two days? I think we're up to about 45. So we pulled out, see, this is what I'm saying, guys, is that where fossils aren't rare, where fossils are found, they're abundant, especially when you get into situations like this. And the geological process is like the hillside slump that's tearing up and destroying these fossils. That process is going on here as well as across all five states. That doesn't stop. That doesn't end. You know, the freeze-thaw, the rain, the snow that comes in, it destroys more fossils than we could, than if every body on the entire planet all came to the Hill Creek and picked up every single fossil, they would still miss fossils. And there would still be fossils being destroyed by just nature doing its thing. So every year this pasture we're in right here, three months out of the year, it has 400 cows sitting on this. We're on a nice leeward side of the hill. It's 25 mile an hour wind up there on top of the hill, but this isn't too bad down here. Cows like it too. When you come here and the cows are in here, it looks like somebody's taking a world tiller across this hill. Any fossil that's being exposed, they trample, stomp, destroy way before anybody gets to see it. And that's what's in across five states. Just by just their livestock. That's just the livestock. That's not weather. That's not. Yeah, that's not freeze-thaw. That's not natural erosion. That's just livestock. And I mean, every one of these ridges have that problem. Not only that, but because these fossils are packed with minerals, they'll actually eat the fossils themselves for the minerals that were within the bones. You know, that's one of the ways animals get minerals is, you know, they lick the dirt. They eat the ground. Well, these fossils have minerals. That's what a fossil is. It's a Snickers bar full of minerals that are within the soil. And these animals will, you know, the fossils don't be too hard that some of them are open and they'll actually eat the fossils. It's crazy. So everything that's out there is trying its best. Everything on this planet is trying to destroy these fossils. Nature hates fossils. So we're out here doing our best to try to collect and preserve as many as we possibly can before those natural processes happen. All right, so this is where we got to last night. I've got a big pubis in the ground, a big hadrosaur pubis. So this is a real... Even though we're deep in the ground, it still broke up a whole bunch. So we've got it exposed. We're going to have to put a plaster jacket on this because it's so flat. But right now it's just sitting dead in the lake. Here's what's wild is, is that there's so much here. I've got this pubis here. I've got another fossil here. I've got another one going in here. What started all this is down here. I've got another bone. This one, it's a big rib going into the ground down here at the bottom of this layer. So this is an event layer. So this is a big flash flood event that came through. Just pulled this out of the ground. This is a giant shell... Is this a shell-crushing shark? Shell-crushing crocodile. A shell-crushing crocodile. Yeah, so he would have been eating shellfish and things like that. That's probably the biggest croc tooth I've ever seen. I know. The ones that I've been fighting have been like a tenth of that size. That's insane. So what's part of the tooth? Explain the anatomy. So this is the tooth at the top. The tip is the tooth and this is the root here. So that came out of a jaw rather than being a tooth that just fell out and was replaced. This came out of a dead crocodile. So there's a possibility that there's a jaw to this animal in here. Yep. So because when the animal dies and they're laying under the water and they're rotting, the teeth are loosening up. The teeth will loosen up in the sockets and fall out. And they'll fall out and kind of float away. So a good indicator that you're getting close to a jaw is you find all of these rooted teeth from one species. So we could be on to something pretty awesome. I mean, you never know. You can see where we're digging. We've got the layer going right here. Back behind us, we've got lots of room to throw the spoil behind us. Parker's got a nice vertebrae that's a hadrosaur. Nice hadrosaur vertebrae that he's exposing. Fixing a pull here in a few minutes. You can see the top process. One of the zags. We're missing one. It probably got lost in the overburden removal, which is unfortunate. But you've got to find it somehow. In that spot there, that's the neural canal. So that's where all of the nerves of the dinosaur would go through that. Of course, this is one vertebrae of a string of vertebrae that would have gone. But there again, guys, it's an isolated bone. It's by itself. There's no animal here. It's just one bone off by itself. So one of the things that we're doing is we are keeping all of these bones together so that if there is a few that come together, we can put together part of an animal. But it's not like what you see in the movies where you've got a giant dinosaur there and it's all there and it's all where you can just pick them all up. It's scattered just like this, where you've got one isolated bone from one species next to another isolated bone from another species next to another isolated bone from another species. It's crazy. So the best we can do is what Parker and them are doing is mapping it out, going around it and pulling it. So one of the questions that gets asked is, OK, so the bones get thrown into these river channels, but what about the organic materials? What about the plants, the leaves, the everything? And they get caught up in there, too. And the only chance that you get to really see these plants are in these clay clasps. And I'm going to pop some of these clay clasps open. And this is one I just popped open. All this little brown bits, all of these little things, these are broken blades of grass and leaves and plants. And this is all organic material that's within here. And you can see all of that. This is the remnants of all the plants. See, there's a big right there. There's a big, big plant part right there. But all these clay clasps are full of all of this really cool fricking organic material. So, you know, they don't fossilize like you would normally see because they are trapped in this clay. So they didn't have the chance and the pressure to really, you know, compact and be something like what you see in the Green River Formation or in other formations. So these clay clasps really have a lot of just really cool organic bits. So when you're digging these things out from the large bones like this, you know, they are surrounded by everything that's in this stream channel, which includes all of the organic material that was washed in there as well. This triceratops vertebra we found yesterday, actually. We're just finally getting down to where we can work it out. There's another one above it. Katie pulled one out yesterday right here. And there's actually the process of another one sticking out of the dirt right there. So we're getting into a cluster of vertebra here. That's something you see fairly common is you'll get log jams. You'll get one bone gets stuck in the mud somehow and all the other bones will start stacking up against it, just like a log jam, like a stick out in the middle of the river, where everything will wash and get stuck up against it. All right, so what we're doing now is we have to map this bone out. So we get a large bone like this. This is something that we don't want to just foil. This is something that we're going to want to put a plaster jacket on because it is so fragile. So what we're going to do is we're going to map the bone out. So we'll dig all the way around it, and then we'll put it up on a pedestal. We'll dig all this dirt down so it's easier to wrap the foil around it, then wrap the burlap around it, and then we'll pop it. And that way it allows it to be safely transported from the dig site back to the prep lab. What's up, guys? I'm so sorry to stop you in the middle of an episode, but we really need your help. Chasing History is brought to you by my business, the Smoky Mountain Relic Room, which is the largest diversity of history for sale anywhere in North America. If I had my choice, I would be doing nothing but out there making documentaries for you guys to learn some cool history from. But unfortunately, we've got to pay the bills. Chasing History is completely funded by Smoky Mountain Relic Room. So if you get a chance and you want to check out some cool history, go to our website, therelicroom.com. We're easy to find. If you want to check out our social media, Smoky Mountain Relic Room, you can't miss us. But if you see some stuff there that you like, man, we would love to get some cool history into your hands. But if you don't, then do. Just pass it on and share it with somebody else. But if you want to support this channel, go to therelicroom.com or Google Smoky Mountain Relic Room. Guys, really, that would be epic. I love you all. Remember, guys, History rocks. Woo! So Tyrannosaurus Rex versus Nano Tyrannus. So right now, nobody, you know, accepts that there is a Nano Tyrannus species out there. Well, yes and no. So what you have is, so they've done publications on both. There was a publication not too long ago that came out that described Nano as a juvenile T-Rex. Okay. But the problem was, is it was described off a partial, non-complete species, or not a complete dinosaur. So they were missing some key elements. And some of the arguments he made don't really stand up to people that have dug a few of them. So what brought this up is, is Ty just found a tooth. This is a Nano tooth. Nano teeth are shaped different than T-Rex. They have a pinch at the end. The serration count is different. The size of the serrations is different. And that's one way you can tell the difference in these teeth, is you actually get out a microscope. And in an eighth of an inch, you can count how many serrations are in that space. And that can tell you a species of a dinosaur. And they're different on Nano to T-Rex. So no matter what dinosaur, that's the way that you, or at least for theropod dinosaurs, that's the way that you tell the difference in the species. That is one way you can tell. Is the spacing. Because no matter, you know, how many different T-Rexes you have, the serrations are always going to be the same. They have the same size of, I think they're called denticles. They have the same size and the same shape of the little bumps on the serrations. So if we were to go back 50 years ago and you were to have found that tooth, that would have been. Nano. No, no, no, no. But if you were to find that tooth 50 years ago, before much research was done, people considered that a T-Rex tooth. Yeah, a lot of times there was a lot of different animals that they kind of grouped all into T-Rex or Tyrannosaurs, which are related to each other. As more is known about these animals, as more of the uncommon and rare ones are found, they're able to differentiate species and separate them out. So what does it take to identify a new species? Because, you know, Nanotyrannus, you know, they're calling it juvenile T-Rex, but, you know, in a sense it's its own species. So what is it going to take in order to, you know, make this a species? Somebody will have to write a paper on a more complete Nanotyrannus. So what happens is, so they had the dueling dinosaurs not too long ago. They are in a repository type museum now, so somebody can write a paper and they're prepping them and there will be papers wrote on them. Digging communities have been kind of joking that rather than somebody writing a paper and saying you're wrong, they're going to write a paper and they're going to put a new name on it. Really? Really. So when you find teeth like this, I mean, you know better. You know that's not a T-Rex tooth. Yeah, that's not a T-Rex. And so you don't label it as T-Rex. No, we don't label it as T-Rex. We label them as nano. We wish we could label them as T-Rex. The value's a lot more. We'd make a lot more money. But that's not the right thing to do. That's not the way we work. And that's the point, you know. You know, when these guys have opportunities to, you know, do the right thing, always do the right thing. And so this is a controversy that literally we're in the middle of right now. And I'm sure you guys out there watching have opinions. What do you guys think? Do you think that there are two different species? Do you think that all of it's just T-Rex or do you think it's another species? Put your comments down in the, put what you think in the comments down below and let's see if we can get a bunch of opinions. These guys have just gotten a huge bone out of the ground. We're low on mics, so we gave the mics to them. Check out this bone. Ty, what do we got? This is a big hadrosaur metatarsal, upper foot bone. And it's very nice. Parker, how long has it taken you to get this out? It's probably been about an hour, so not too bad for such a big bone. You'd think this is just one toe, which is absolutely crazy because this is over a foot long. And how many toes would be in a foot? There's five on each foot. Well, on each foot, yeah. Their hands are different, but their feet on there would have five of those. So this is a foot bone? Foot bone. It's a metatarsal. So they walked up on their toes like this, and this would have been the bone up here on the upper foot. Okay. So this is one of the common species, right? It's a common species. And this is actually a fairly common bone that we find quite a few of. They held together. They're fairly solid. They're short and compact, so they didn't get busted up as easy. And I don't think they were very chewy. Parker, is this the first bone like this you found? Yes, this is the first toe bone I've ever found. In Jurassic, Cretaceous, and it's very, very good looking. How stoked are you? Very stoked. This is like, it's just such a good-looking bone. Like, this looks like dinosaur. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, some of the other bones you find, you know, they're dinosaur, but they're smaller. Like this, it just screams dinosaur. So what's the next step on this bone? Well, we're going to make a nest for it with some foil. We'll pull it out. These are solid enough and been glued enough that they don't need to be put in plaster jackets. Plaster jackets take time, and it's very easy to actually cause damage to the bone when you're pulling the jacket off. On a bone like this, where it's solid enough, we'll just foil it, take it home just like that, prep it out, finish cleaning it up. Doesn't look like there needs to be a lot of work done on this piece, other than just cleaning it up. No, we took our time making sure to brush away all the dirt before we were gluing, because that's a big issue you run into. As long as they did their job and they got enough glue in it, the bottom will peel up. If it peels, then we'll have to fix it, but we'll see. Glue ready just in case? Glue ready just in case. Just roll it towards you gently. There you go. Okay, don't bridge it yet. It's actually upside down. That's fine. That is an awesome toe. That's a nice one. And it's one of five bones. It's one of five in that foot of the six hadrosaurs we have. So there's 60 of them floating around in here somewhere. Well, I hope to find another. Go ahead and flip it over. That's the position it would have been in in life. Turn it sideways to them so you can see the... Turn it sideways like that. So these would have been all flat, would have lined up on top for the next bones to articulate to. This curve would have been for the toes to articulate on. Yeah, that's killer, man. That is fine. That's just dirt. Let's wrap her up. That's awesome. And like Kyle was saying, this is one of 60 of just the four or five animals that we found out. Yeah, the hadrosaurs that we know of, they're in this quarry. Uh-oh. One discovery. I can see it sticking out of the hill right there. Oh, yeah, right there. But they should be at the other side of it right there. Direction it's going, sure looks like it's going that way to me. Maybe you ought to follow the bone. I don't know, it's a weird concept. Follow the bone rather than stab it into the dirt. But it's fun to stab. I know. Kyle, we're focused on this bone. I know, and then you got another bone up against it, and then you get another bone up against it. But this is something that has a... I mean, it's a problem when you're digging these because you get stuff together. Point of discovery is sometimes it's you get lucky and you just barely uncover it. Sometimes you stab it. Sometimes it gets damaged. I mean, it's just... That's why there's a prep lab. That's why there's a prep. I mean, it's... We're doing no more damage to these bones than the first freeze thaw or the first cow will do. I can guarantee that. And that's the thing is, I mean, it looks like chaos, but it's a controlled... But it's really, it's controlled chaos, you know, where you can collect all the pieces and they can always go back together. Yeah, you get very good at doing puzzles doing this. Yeah, if you're a puzzle person, this is your dream thing. So, now, Ty, we've got a hadrosaur right here. How many hadrosaurs have you pulled out? Right now, we know we have six different hadrosaurs at least in this quarry. So you've got... Size-wise of all finding the same bone. Size-wise, we have six different sizes. I should say six hadrosaurs. It might be 20. But we have six different sizes for sure. So you could possibly have 20 hadrosaurs, but you definitely have six different... We actually have six different for sure on two different trikes, plus everything. All right. Yeah, and that's... I mean, that's just in this whole area. Right. We know that that was scattered in here. Now, what's their next step on this bone right here? Is it getting ready? They've dug around it. They've stabilized. They put fluid in everywhere. So he's loosening it up at the time to make sure... You can see all these roots that have grown into it. So the hard part is, is these roots will anchor it. They'll be in the bone and they'll be biting on the bone. You pick it up and rip a piece out. So you want to make sure you've got it cut loose as best you can. And then you just... You want to roll it out? Sure. Roll it towards you. You want to roll it fairly quickly and see. Okay. See where it peeled just a little teeny bit there on that back corner. So what we'll do is we'll stabilize where it peeled there. Watch that glue in your face. And then we'll take a brush. You should be able to set it down now. And that's from what you were just talking about, where you get the roots... We'll have roots and stuff that grab onto it. Exactly. But it's something that can easily be repaired. It is. Those are the three pieces that came out right there. They're in good shape. We'll puzzle them back in there and put it back together when we get back to prep lab. So this is a hydrosaur vertebrae. What part of the body... Tail vertebrae. Yeah, this is called... This is tail vertebrae. Okay. That's such a cool... It's a dinosaur! I mean, how epic is this, guys? This is nuts, man. And what's so cool is right next to it, there's another bone. And right next to it, there's another bone. Look! Right at your feet, there's another bone. What's that giant bone? It's a giant bone. Giant bone. Giant mystery bone. So this is a really good example of... Here, we can talk about this real quick. Okay. So this is a big bone. This probably was like a femur or something like that. Now, before this was buried, this was beaten up. This was rolled around in the flood. This was chewed on by other critters. It's missing the end, and it's missing the whole end that way. So this is just a big chunk of a big femur. At this point, it really has zero scientific value. It doesn't tell you anything about this, except we know that... I believe this is triceratops, but it's hard to even tell that. That's all you're going to learn from this bone. You're not going to learn anything else important from this bone. So academically, they would not collect this. This would be left. This is a classic example of a bone that just nobody cares about. Nobody wants. But we will take this bone, and we will clean it up, and we'll put it on a stand, and you can have a nice, affordable, reasonable piece of a dinosaur for display. And see, guys, that's the whole point that we're trying to get across to everybody is, is that there's so much of this material out here that it's worth saving because it still is. It's a dinosaur bone. It's a fossil. It should be appreciated and collected and taken care of. Scientifically, it has no value. Every science classroom in America should have one of these in it. And here's the thing, is they can't. There's enough bones out there for every single class in America to have their own big chunk of dinosaur bone. It's really simple. So one thing that we make sure that we do is we pick up everything. We collect everything. We don't leave anything behind. No matter how damaged it is or how distorted it is, even small little bits we will take and we'll collect. And some of the smaller bits, what do you do with a lot of those bits? A lot of them we'll be able to identify. We knew, like this one, there's pieces coming off. We'll be able to identify it. We put them in a bag. We put a tag, a label with them with educational material on it. And, I mean, we put them out for sale or we donate them to schools. How many bags do you donate to school on average? Oh, how about we do at least a couple thousand. Just fossils in general. Fossils in general, thousands. Thousands a year. Thousands a year of what we donate to schools in all honesty. I mean, there isn't a teacher that walks into the shop or one of the booths, one of the shows, that doesn't walk away without a smile on their face. And see, that's just it. These fossils are out there and they can do the best good that this fossil can do is in somebody's hands to get them excited about history because that's what it's going to take. You can watch Jurassic Park all you want to. It's not going to get you as excited as actually holding a dinosaur bone in your hand. Now, one thing is how do you tell the different species of bone from one species to another? Well, some of them are pretty easy. Some of them, like a Triceratops frill has the big blood grooves and stuff in it and it jumps out at you. Sometimes you have to look at all the little small processes, the little trochanter, the little things coming off it to compare because this bone has a little trochanter that sticks this way and this bone has it that sticks this way. And so you've got to go through and look and see. Sometimes the differences are very small and very minute. And it's by looking at academic publications that we do that. And there's a lot of research that you do that goes into this. There is, yeah. I mean, just finding the right paperwork to look at stuff. I mean, yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot more book work and paperwork involved in this than just digging dinosaurs. See, the one thing that you've got to remember is that a lot of the work has already been done. Yes, there are new species that are found, but a lot of times you're going to find the same species over and over and over again. And we're in an area where we're in the Hell Creek Formation and all the dinosaurs that are common or that can be found in the Hell Creek, they've all had papers on them. All the bones are out there to study and examine. And so we know that there's how many species of common stuff is in the Hell Creek Formation? Oh, there's probably 10 or 12 that are pretty common. When I say common, it's like, you know, hadrosaurs are cows. I mean, it's like there's that many of them. It's like cows. They're everywhere. Triceratops, like the cows. There's that many of them. And then you start getting into the ones that are still common but not quite as common. Yeah, and so that work's already been done. So you know that, okay, in this layer, we're going to find these 10 common species. So then you look at the bone difference between those 10 common species. And, you know, a Triceratops bone looks totally different from a T. rex bone, which looks totally different from a hadrosaur bone, which looks totally different from a Triceratops bone, just in the bone marrow itself. So you can look at a bone. You can look at the marrow. You can look at the density. And you can tell the difference between those species, you know, from something simple as that because a lot of the work has already been done. You know, we're not going to find, you know, sauropods out here. Because sauropods didn't live in the Cretaceous. So a lot of it goes into, you know, knowing the history of your area and the history of the formation that you're digging. You know, you're not going to find long-necked dinosaurs in the Cretaceous in the Hell Creek Formation because they didn't exist then. The work has already been done. But we are going to find, you know, these 10 specific dinosaurs and others that are in this formation that should be there because the work's already been done. So a good example is Marsh was digging the Hell Creek in the 1800s. Triceratops that everybody knows and recognizes. That's been recognized and he wrote papers and he wrote publications and did all the charts and everything on it. 130, 140 years ago is when they found that dinosaur and they've been studying it ever since. I mean, they've dug hundreds of them at this point. So it's not like you find a Triceratops. And it's that rare and it's something new. I mean, they do find new things on occasion, but just the Triceratops that everybody's most familiar with, they've been digging for 140 years. So when you see on a Facebook post or whatever out there on social media, Triceratops discovered! It's not a big deal because there's literally been hundreds and even thousands of complete specimens that have been dug over the 150 years that that species has been known. It's not a big deal to find. How big of a deal is it to find a dinosaur? I mean, if you want to find one, it takes five minutes. I mean, in all honesty, to find something that, you know, to find rare stuff is hard. It's hard to find rare things. To find the common stuff, it's not that hard. It's out there. It's not, you know, we go for walks. We get on these ranches and we start exploring and we find stuff every day. It's unusual to go more than a couple hours and not be finding something that we have to dig out of the ground. One of the things that we're trying to do is to educate you guys, educate the public on, you know, the reality of these fossils. You know, you get tricked out by social media that shows, oh, rare dinosaur, rare Triceratops found, whatever. It's a big deal and everybody's talking about it. Anytime any one of those posts come on, Ty gets, I can't tell you how many messages from people. Did you see the Triceratops that was discovered? I get a million messages. Did you see this? Wow! And, you know, it's like it's a common thing that happens because people, you, have the perception that fossils are crazy rare and that only a few of them are discovered every 10 years when the reality of them is that they are discovered every single day. Guys like this out here in the field doing this commercially. The problem is that academically, they don't have the money, time, resources, or place to put them. They walk past hundreds and thousands of dinosaurs looking for the rare ones because they want to find the new things. They want to be able to write papers. They want to study the stuff that's been studied for 150 years. They walk by and go, yep, that's it. Yep, there's another one. And they just continue on their way. And we're not trying to harp on anybody, but what we're trying to do is, so we're at kind of like a crossing point where enough has been understood about the common things. It's like, okay, what do you do with the rest of the common stuff that are out there? Like this stuff. And it's like, okay, now it's time to get them into the hands of the public. And that's what we're trying to promote is to start getting fossils that are common out into the hands of the public because this stuff really isn't that rare. But the public still has an understanding that these fossils are incredibly rare when really they're not. I mean, look right there. We got another fossil. We got another dinosaur. It's a rib. So it's a rib. How many ribs do you have? It looks like probably a trike rib. Every trike's got, what is it, 40 ribs? We got two trikes in this, Corey. So that's 80 ribs right here. We've dug trike ribs for the last two weeks all over these ranches. Do the math. You got 40 ribs in one animal, and there were millions of animals that just lived within, I don't know, a 30-year time span. That's a lot of ribs, you know. So, I mean, these fossils are out there, and then you times that by the entire length of the Cretaceous era. I mean, there's a lot of stuff out there. So that's a big trike rib going into the building? I believe that's a trike rib, yeah. Looks like it from here. I mean, it's hard to know until you get the head and everything, but, yeah, it's probably a trike rib from the size. So it's a common thing. What are you going to do with that? Well, we'll clean it up. We'll put it on a stand. We'll put a label with it, and we'll sell it to somebody that wants to use it for display. Now, who are the people that are buying these fossils? Who are collecting them? It's everybody from just collectors that want to have a piece of dinosaur. I mean, there's some people that are very serious. They want to collect all sorts of dinosaurs. There's some people that just want a piece of a dinosaur to show off. There's people that grandparents buy a lot of dinosaur material to give their grandkids to try to get them interested in something besides the TV and the video games. I mean, we have other museums from outside the country. We have commercial museums or private museums that buy dinosaur material from us because, once again, if it's not a repository, if it's a commercial museum or privately owned, they can't come dig dinosaurs unless it's on private land. They can't pick up all these dinosaurs we're talking about. How often do you have those kind of museums approach you looking for things? All the time. All the time? All the time. What kind of things are they looking for? They're looking for stuff for exhibits. It's their education. They want to draw the public. They want to educate the public. So they want material that they feel fits what their message is and what they're trying to show the world. So they're looking for new exhibit materials or to fill these museums. Now, how much of your year do you spend out in the field digging? No, at least half. So half of six months you're out digging. And you're digging not just dinosaurs, but you're digging a bunch of different stuff. Yeah, we dig. We do a bunch of different things. I mean, the biggest thing is the dinosaurs anymore, but we have a rock shop. We do crystals, the minerals, and the petrified wood and all that stuff as well. So if people want to get a hold of you, where can they get a hold of you? We're Utah Dump Digger. Facebook's an easy one. You can see all the videos of us doing this sort of stuff all the time. UtahDumpDigger.com is our website. We have stuff for sale. You can see some of the finished product on there. Just check it out. If you guys want someone fun to follow, that guy is fun to follow because he posts all the time. Always doing something. Always discovering something. See, that's the thing is that history is discovered every single day, literally every single day by guys like that. And even by us, the Smoky Mountain Relic Group, we're out hunting this history as well. But we're working with guys like Ty because, you know, we've got a store to run. So we can't be outside every single day like Ty can. So there's history out there to find and there's people out there doing it. And that's something that you can get involved doing. If you want to do this for a living, you want to put in the work, you can do this for a living. There is literally nothing stopping you from doing this for a living. In our next episode of this four-part series, a hard rain rolled in overnight. And the crew races the clock to save every exposed dinosaur fossil. Now it all comes down to this. Stay tuned for part four of our Ultimate Dinosaur Hunting Guide. We're working on tail vert from a triceratops. Tadrosaur. Tomato, tomato. You know, we're all still learning, but Ty's the pro over there. You listen to one guy about digging dinosaurs, the next thing you know, you're in the middle of Montana. Make good slaves. Yeah, we work for food and bones.