Rare Shark Found in Bear Gulch Limestone! | Fossils So Detailed They Can Be CT Scanned (Episode 2)

All right so we are it always happens like this so we ate dinner well first rain like hell and then we ate dinner and then we decided we were going to go out to a new spot to dig to see if we can find some stuff sure not really expecting to find anything it's a couple miles from camp so take off through the woods packs hammers everything and about an hour of digging I find the find of my life at least for this formation anyhow there's this is like straw man dude this is so awesome and it could possibly be a new species it just it needs research so had to scamper run a couple miles back to camp get the camera gear run the couple miles back out here climb up the cliff so that we can show you guys what a shark looks like previously on chasing history the team ventured deep into the remote bear gulch limestone uncovering fossils from a lost prehistoric world frozen in time along the way they revealed rare ancient fish and explored the dangerous cliffside quarry where some of the formation's most important discoveries were first made now in episode two the adventure pushes even farther as chase and matthew return to the original research quarry battle treacherous terrain uncover new fossils hidden within the limestone and reveal why bear gulch may hold some of the best preserved ancient marine life on earth all right guys so we got some excitement down here on our lower shelf we're gonna run down and see what these guys have found all right matt so what do we got we found something pretty awesome oh yeah they're they're not super rare but this is a good one so what we have here is an aphalodotus austin that would be the head that's the head and then the body dips underneath the rock you have most of the tail and it should end oh wow it is kind of snaky yeah oh that's cool so what species is this aphalodotus austin okay what's the importance of this animal so this animal is an eniopterygian um it's a very primitive fish their bones are more made of cartilage than they are actual bone uh so what they represent is basically a an overlap between the more advanced fish of the bear gulch and a lot of the more primitive fish that came before them how far back does this species go you know i'm honestly not too sure i'd have to look into that but they are documented in several other deposits here in the u.s and overseas i believe as well that's crazy so how could you tell all of that information from just these that just this little line here and that little head there so a lot of that's going to be off of experience i've uh we find one to two of these per year they're not super common but they are common enough we do get them fairly frequently and we've had them where they've been more exposed but the big big telltale for an aphalodotus is one the lack of fins the lack of a tail that you'd expect for a fish the preservation you can see how the vertebrae are they look like they it the preservation looks more like a shark than it does a fish so there's no they're always two-dimensional it's a head with a spine every time and just the way the vertebrae are structured we can tell it it it isn't aphalodotus so is there a modern equivalent to this fish not that i'm aware of they are completely gone so this is a whole line of species that is completely extinct from the earth oh yeah yeah so they would have popped up they would have radiated out and had some distant cousins that were closely related but it is a dead end as far as i know no way that's cool yeah that's way cool so is there any more prep that you can do on this at all or is this it so um we're gonna try to get this section prepped out and see if we can expose the rest of it as well as the rest of the tail um hopefully we can but in a lot of cases in this deposit what you see is what you get so it's a dice roll it's a gamble but we've got a close friend of ours that he is i call him a wizard when it comes to prep work so we're gonna this is probably going to be one to send off to him and uh we'll make some make the magic happen how important is prep work when doing this it is the majority of the labor so really finding the stuff is the fun part and a lot of it is the hard labor but the time consuming part of getting a fossil from start to finish from from out of the ground to a finished piece in an exhibit or on in a display case or even in the showroom to be sold it uh it's all in the prep work now unlike the green river formation which can be prepped down to the fossil that's not possible with this material not always some of it can not all of it can though okay why is that um it's just the composition of the limestone and in some cases the uh you can't get it to separate so what you're doing is you're grinding grinding the limestone down to the fossil and you end up damaging it right so just wherever those micro fractures exist in the rock that's all you're gonna get absolutely yeah generally but i that new species of opioid that we found it was completely covered other than the center disc and and ben was able to to sprinkle some magic dust on it and make all the legs exposed i mean he really did a great job so that's awesome yep yep that's awesome well cool fine dude nice oh yeah very exciting all right matt so we finally found something that's a little bit different than the fish yep what do we got man so what we have is the tail to a file of carrot it's a cousin of the shrimp we don't have these around anymore um they are completely extinct so this is an totally extinct species yes yes so this would be a cyrocaris centurion is the type of file of carrot and file of carrots differ from shrimp the easiest way for people to tell there's a lot of differences but would be the tail okay that spike is not present on any modern shrimp or fossil shrimp they have more of a fan-shaped tail which they use to quickly propel again away from predators um now this one is just a tail you're missing the rest of the body but then you have a piece of it right there as well um so that piece of it that's right there what is that uh it's just a piece of the the shell so this would be a molt okay um when arthropods grow that their exoskeleton does not grow with them they have to actually shed it um so when they when they exit out of the the exoskeleton it can stay in one piece it can lose a piece it can go into a thousand pieces and their body is actually really soft and really squishy at that time now when they are in that squishy state they do release a pheromone or at least the modern ones do that fish can can detect and it sends them into a feeding frenzy if you ever have a pet crawfish in an aquarium and you have fish there the crawfish could be five times the size but the moment it molts it has no defenses and it will it'll lose arms it'll lose legs they may i mean the fish could be half the size and they'll just swarm it and pick it and destroy it that's cool so because this one is not complete and that's reinforced by the the little piece you have off to the side we can say for sure that this is a molt now did that syracharis get eaten after it molted maybe it's impossible to say gotcha that is way cool yeah isn't it nice well i didn't know that you could get things like exoskeletons or molts or stuff like that that that stuff could be fossilized but that stuff can be oh yeah so most of the fossil fit or fossil shrimp that you see are molts really yeah the vast majority of them so if you take a look at a lot of the shrimp i found before you got here they're meant all missing a piece usually it's the very end of the tail but they're all missing something is there uh any modern equivalent to this animal uh the closest thing would be our modern shrimp okay all right yep yeah cool all right matt so we got a new spot right here that we're working on yep so this is just another shelf now why are we picking this shelf out of all these spots out here why are we picking so pretty simple um this spot got cleared at some point you can tell by the lack of vegetation or how young a lot of the vegetation is minus that bush that's been there a long time okay um we're also looking at the level of weathering okay so if we take a look from the side of the outcrop down below where we're standing okay um you'll be able to see it a lot better so do you see how all those thin layers are splitting they're very friable and then we have a heavily fractured limestone and it just continues all the way down we're gonna have a lot more material to work with here than that old quarry we've been working so you mean the chances of things to split is going to be a lot better bingo so not a lot of hitting it with the hammer just peeling the layers yeah i mean we'll still have to hit the limestone with hammers to make sure all the dishes have popped but it's not going to be 20 pound sledge it's going to be our six pound hammers gotcha so what are you doing to prep this up so we're we got to get the dirt and debris off um so luckily there's this nice hard limestone layer that's going to be mostly flat there's a little bit of the thin layers on top so we're we're peeling it back we're getting all the dirt off we're going to get the vegetation off the moss the grass everything and we'll clear it to about where the rake is and then we'll just take it down and that'll be a good tester to see if it's worth spending more time on so total time to test it it's going to be like an hour hour and a half versus fighting it and fighting it and fighting it and potentially finding nothing right all right man well we'll let you get to shoveling cool and if you come up hey matt what do we got going on so i'm getting ready to get caught up on trimming we have the the two really nice fish i found over the past couple days we've got the strip so to scale all these need to be trimmed down into smaller pieces which make them easier to transport and if i do it here i don't have to do it at home so that's less material that you have to haul back and because these are all irregular shapes if you get them down to a standard shape it'll protect the fossil better yeah absolutely at that point i can stand them up right in a box and they hold up a lot better and what you just got a little generator yep i've got a little table saw yep little generator and tile saw that's perfect for this kind of field absolutely yep yep so let me get in here and get started now why are you wearing a respirator so you don't want to inhale any dust especially when you're cutting rocks and and this is a wet saw but because there's no water up here i just run it dry it works well enough but um with this limestone and its silica content silicosis is a very very dangerous thing to mess with you can't get rid of it there's no cure for it so why take the risk i mean i can filter out a fart and not even smell it so i know there's no dust getting in my lungs at that point so i tested it too after trimming down the fossils matt and chase get back on the trail to head to another dig site so one question that i've got is is how do sites like this initially get discovered i mean you know we're not near any major cities we're we're way far out in the middle of a state that already has a low population and you know this formation isn't very big or this member of this formation is not very big so you know how do how do these sites get discovered so a lot of them will get discovered while we're looking for minerals or rocks for industrial purposes so in the early 1900s i believe usgs was around then it might have been shortly before there was a big boom of people running out looking for new geology to describe and and name and all that so this this member actually got described in the early 1900s around 1920 to 1930 wow that late yeah yeah and and uh so when it got described it got listed as mississippian in age it was in a completely different formation um now it wasn't until 94 that jack horner reassigned the bear gulch member to the heath formation and or it originally got the got declared pennsylvania in age which is jack horner moved it back to mississippian said it's out of the heath formation and that's where it's been since so but at the time it was originally discovered it was considered void of fossils void of minerals and pretty much no industrial uses whatsoever now hold on on the age so how can you assume that one is mississippian and then one or one is pennsylvanian and then mississippian how do they figure out the age of this formation so back then we didn't have the the the sophisticated techniques that we do now like radiometric dating or optically stimulated luminescence or any of that so i am honestly not sure how they figured out the ages and they've changed a lot since we first started studying geology and started documenting all this stuff um but at at that time it would have correlated with another formation in the area that they had a more definitive age they knew okay yeah this is pennsylvanian in age now whether or not that number matched what we had now it probably didn't okay but as far as different or separating them into the different geologic periods we've been doing that for a very long time okay yeah all so you know early 1900s hey this bare gold formation don't worry there's nothing in it we checked yeah walk away oh yeah so how do you get from hey we checked walk away don't worry about it nothing to see here to you know holy crap there's actually stuff here oh yeah no so so this formation it didn't have any gold didn't have any oil didn't have any metals or anything else that we could plunder yeah exactly plunder out of it and break the rock down and refine but the one thing it did have really nice limestone that could be used for uh for construction like building courthouses building homes building churches all that so all that real thick dense limestone exactly got a bus true yeah that would be great building oh absolutely so in the 60s there a uh a local started mining this material for uh construction purposes and around 1964 he found the first fish in the barrel so just out here trying to make a living selling rock yeah it was like holy there's a fish exactly yeah so i mean if you look around this area here you'll see stacks of flagstone or stacks of limestone those those are from that original okay and he continued digging that limestone for many years after i'm not sure when he quit i'm not sure why he quit he might have aged out and kids weren't interested in taking it up no idea right so that part of the history of the site is unfortunately lost but this is the site where we're at i'm fairly certain this is the only place i found that is actually this this is really cool so this and probably used up into the early 2000s i would say reckon with the state of the equipment that's been left here yeah i mean they replaced several parts within the last 5-10 years like the hydraulics and whatnot so it it was pretty recent pretty recent yeah so they were still getting it out of here but this is the only spot on the entire property where any kind of mining or pouring has gone so while we don't know 100 for sure we're 99 sure that this was the where the very first fossils in this member was discovered that's epic oh yeah so what happened next how are you so now he you know the original you know guy who was out here mining said boom we got fossils what happened next he contacted an institution i believe it was carnegie but it might have been a different one and that's when the work started in this area um and shortly after london grogan got involved and they did the bulk of the work on this formation and really did a great job so an institute checked and we're like hey there actually is some stuff here to find well and then researchers then came in exactly and started doing the research well i mean when when a rancher pops up with an undocumented lamprey i mean that's pretty significant was that what it was yeah yeah i'm fairly certain that's awesome so that got people's attention oh yeah so that's when that's when a lot of the older quarries that we pick at that i've shown you and whatnot started to be made when a lot of the work started to get done the interns were getting the quit cracked on them to move the rock and find the good stuff so see here's what's interesting is is that you know we think that everything's been discovered we think that everything's been found but that's not the case i mean we're talking 1960s that that in 1959 there's nothing here absolutely nothing 1960 whatever there's we've got fossils to find this is this exists yeah i mean that's just mind-blowing to me today that you know there are still places that within living memory you know was just you know things were discovered that could educate us about a period of time that we would have had no idea about absolutely how common is that i mean is that is is that kind of thing still going on to this day absolutely yeah another example um i you know i can't think of any specific examples off the top of my head but it's not it's not an uncommon occurrence for a formation to be declared void but then you find the one little area where it happened to form happen to have the right conditions where you get fossils to to be discovered and because this is such a new relatively speaking new discovery there's not a lot of scientific research that's been done here so you know so with the stuff that you're that you're finding that you're digging you know you find something significant you make sure that you do your best to make sure that researchers get out absolutely if people wanted to contact you and and aid in researching the fossils that are found here what's uh is that something you'd be up for absolutely yeah they they i mean they can reach us via email matt dot man man uh minuteman fossils at gmail.com or social media yeah we'll put all that information at the bottom of the episode but that's something that you would love to have oh 100 i i mean i i love doing this stuff but the work that they do is what gets me excited because the more we learn the more we all learn you know i mean the the more research they're able to do the more mysteries are solved and the more fewer frustrations i have about not knowing so yeah see there's always things to still discover and if you want to be part of it if you're a paleontological academic researcher who is getting a degree or wanting to write papers on something on new species or whatever this is a formation you can come out talk to matt this is this is a a history where there's still stuff being discovered and that is freaking epic dude that's awesome yeah all right well let's check out the rest of the site what's up guys i am so sorry to interrupt you all in the middle of an episode but we could really use your help chasing history is brought to you by the smoky mountain relic room the smoky mountain relic room is our business where we work really hard to bring cool fossils minerals meteorites artifacts all kinds of cool epic history into your life at prices you can afford and so chasing history is the educational arm of this business i all i ever wanted to be was a history teacher and so it's my way of fulfilling that history teacher need by getting out and being able to teach you cool stuff about the past but we can't do that without your help so if you wouldn't mind going and checking out the relic room.com seeing what we got if you see some cool stuff you like dude epic that we'd love to get some stuff into your hands if not man pass it to the next person we just appreciate you taking the time to watch and look and to check out our stuff also check out the people that support us check out the people that we're interviewing they've all got social media and they've all got websites if you wouldn't mind checking out their stuff and supporting them dude we're just a band of history nerds doing what we love and we would love your support so if you guys wouldn't mind checking us out we'd really appreciate it all so matt how do you figure out exactly where to dig i mean you've got this is a huge area yeah so i mean obviously there's there's not really a map so how do you decide hey i think this would be a good spot to dig um so i base a lot of that off of weathering um and also the the ease to remove all the rock that i dig up so like if you have piles building up versus a cliff there's no reason to dig below spots when you could just throw the the spoils off the cliff gotcha okay let's work so we come to a cliff like this we're kind of cliffed out so we got a finger out there oh yeah so that would be a good a good place to do right the fingers are usually my priority because you have three sides of erosion and then the top gets erosion as well so they're usually really really nice that makes a lot of sense so how much of this area have you covered oh we've we've hiked and explored at least 60 percent of it there's still some areas some little crevices and valleys and whatnot like there's a lower valley over there with a meadow that i have not been in at all yet so when you say explore do you mean gone and prospected on um gone and hiked looked for new new deposits there's still a lot of areas that i'd like to clear off and i'd like to dig but there's only so much time in each season that's true so part of your your thought for how to best attack this formation is is expose as many spots as you can because weathering is such a factor absolutely and you need site spots to weather so you'll come in you'll clear and get a spot prepared and then you'll get a bunch of other spots prepared and then just start digging from one spot to the other until you've dug down to the layer where it doesn't work you need it to weather over a season absolutely or multiple so really how many quarries do you say think that you have open oh so far um i believe we're at 16 so how many did you start with this season this season so far i've dug five i've opened and closed five quarries okay so you've opened and closed five quarters how many do you think you'll have at the end of the season uh we're shooting for another 10 more no so 26 so nearly 30 different quarries just about now when he says quarries we're not talking like these giant monstrosities i mean these are you know small little areas but you know the name of the game is working through the rock you know these fossils are sparsely found through the rock so the more the rock that you can work through the better your chances are to find stuff and it's not like you're going to run out of rock there's literally a freaking mountain at this formation comprised of there's literally 10,000 years of fossil hunting that can be had on this place and even in 10,000 years do you think they get it all no yeah no no not because you have to wait for the weathering yeah yeah yeah if every if every person in the united states descended on this place and and continuously dug every year every season they couldn't work through it all in a thousand years like it's insane how big these areas are and that's true for a lot of fossil formations so you know the the big misnomer is is that you know yes these fossil resources are very important and that some need to be preserved but there's a lot of freaking land out there to dig i mean you know there are areas that are the size of you know fossil formations that are the size of connecticut i mean you can't dig all of connecticut so you know by getting out here and exploring this stuff you know matt's getting an opportunity to you know add things to our knowledge and our understanding and then get fossils out to the public where they or to museums where they wouldn't have something from this era of time so it's actually it's really cool but it's a lot of freaking war yes it is yeah okay all right let's keep going all right hey chase might want to check this out oh what we got we got an adorable little baby fish oh yeah yep so he i found him a cute minute or two ago so he's faded but we'll give him a quick spray because there's a very important detail on them i think you should see so the you can see all the whole body on them is really good detail but you see that dark spot there yeah that's the pigments from the eyeball are you serious so you're looking at a 400 million year old eye that's insane how is that possible so that that's possible because of the the unique preservation of the site and lager stockings in general you uh because of the deposition and everything was just right we get a lot of that soft tissue preservation so this fish because it wasn't scavenged on every part of it got preserved um now the preservation isn't good enough to preserve like the organs and that kind of thing but the eyes for whatever reason usually get preserved when you find them nice enough no way yeah that's epic yeah crazy what other soft-bodied things can be seen i mean is there like organ preservation there has been organ preservation found here in the the bear gulch limestone in one section there was extra uh phosphite preservation um so which you commonly find shark teeth in florida in those phosphate mines they they just do really well but in this deposit when you have that situation which i haven't found that layer yet they uh you can ct scan them to see the organs the nerves everything so it's a specific layer that you have that detailed soft correct yeah and how much of that work has been done where people have ct scanned to try to understand the internal organs you know they the london grogan did a good amount of work on that material and uh but with ct scans yeah yeah but the only one that they were really consistently successful with was a small eel-like shark called a harpego and there's really good paper on that so i'll have to send it to you and you can uh you can shove a picture or something yeah send that we'll add it in we'll add it into here that is so cool man so so excited at a 400 million year old fish eye is shade better for it yeah that's oh yeah there you go look at that that is the eye of the past that is so cool oh that's awesome and here is it okay if i'm yeah yeah for sure i'm gonna take all those pieces but they're all right there just don't throw them yeah yeah let's not throw these down the hill wow that is so freaking cool yeah it's a cute little that is and see this stuff is a lot neater than you know the green river or even the sultan hope but i mean this is like its own really cool absolutely yeah you know absolutely now and i'll also tell you too with the smaller fish you know they're pretty common but the nice thing about them is they're almost always beautifully preserved yeah and and there's just a trend within the bear gulch the smaller you are and this goes for a lot of fossils but here especially the smaller you are the more likely you are to get well preserved and it's because you're less likely to get scavenged well not only that but you know the quicker you can be covered up exactly yeah where nothing can get you oh yeah exactly that's cool awesome man fine oh thank you thank you matt what do we got so we have a heartbreaker it's the tail to a credo sector populosum coelacanth now this one was in a layer that it's just covered in roots um so the rest of the coelacanth was literally a faint stain on the rock and this is the only thing that really survived why is this species special so coelacanths we still have around coelacanths around today but uh but we didn't know we did until about the 60s when they were found off the coast of south africa really it was a hidden fossil oh yeah or uh a lot of people call them living fossils but i personally don't like that term because they have changed a lot over the eons now what's special about uh credo sector is that they still have the same body plan as our modern coelacanths so but they're scaled way down they have the same fins the same overall morphology uh but they're 400 million years older so you've just got a tail what do you do with just a tail so just the tail you know it's it's tough with a lot of fish if it was like a windy ichthys which is our most common fish i wouldn't even collect it but with the coelacanth that tail will have a root lobe it's underneath the rock on this one but i can expose that root lobe and that's one of the the most popular features i actually have a guy that requested a tail because he doesn't want a full coelacanth he just wants a piece of one nice that's awesome so no fossil gets wasted no no we keep everything we can unless it's uh unless it's a clam and this one because of roots yeah this one unfortunately the roots got to it before we could so gotcha is what it is given another season the tail probably wouldn't even be there absolutely if that yeah absolutely cool fine yeah that's awesome what's up guys i'm so sorry to interrupt you in front in the middle of this episode but just give me one quick second so these fossils that you're seeing that we're talking about you guys can take them home like we're all commercial paleontologists we all go out and we hunt this stuff and we offer it for sale for you guys same thing with matthew matthew's a commercial guy and he's got a great website minutemantradingpost.com we're going to put the link in the description and we'll put the link down here so you guys can go and check it out but these are some of the fossils that matthew actually dug so this is all some stuff that you guys can take home that's out of the bear gulch formation now we have them on our website but what we ask you guys to do is is go check out matt's stuff because matt's going to have some cool stuff that we don't have he's even going to have a lot better things than what we have we've just got you know kind of the common get you started stuff matt's got some really epic things so if you get a chance go check out matt's website dude we would so appreciate you guys supporting the guys that and gals that support us so this whole community works because we all support each other and we just ask for your help remember guys history rocks all right so we are it always happens like this so we ate dinner well first rain like hell and then we ate dinner and then we decided we were going to go out to a new spot to dig to see if we can find some stuff sure not really expecting to find anything it's a couple miles from camp so take off through the woods packs hammers everything and about an hour of digging i find the find of my life at least for this formation anyhow there's this is like straw man dude this is so awesome and it could possibly be a new species it just it needs research so had to scamper run a couple miles back to camp get the camera gear run the couple miles back out here climb up the cliff so that we can show you guys what a shark looks like so i want to show you guys the area that we're digging in this is a gorgeous conifer forest in montana and if you can see through the trees we've got our dig way way up there so it's always a trip and a half after a couple miles walk to get back up to camp there's no trails you know we're just scampering scampering back up see this pile this is all from previous excavations out here all of this rock that's been cut dug crazy thing is that this is grizzly bear country which makes it extra fun so now we got the long hike back up to the top got the camera gear oh after a rainstorm these rocks get kind of slick but generally when you're fossil hunting or doing any kind of hunting it's when you least expect it that you discover something i mean we didn't expect to find anything but we sure did tell you what it's 5,000 foot elevations killing me so we're coming up to the top and it is a hike to get up here and there's the guys all right guys so we're bringing you all back to check out this find of course we leave the camera so man dude i'm i'm stoked like this is like this is awesome this is what you were pushing this is what i was pushing for this is what i was cleaning this whole pad scott hop over here yeah where people can get a straight on shot because you you're you're silence and then you're automatic don't touch anything said it all huh said it all so what do we got so you join the shark club so what we have here is the skull partially exposed skull the shark there'd be uh eye pigments there so like we talked about the eyeball and we have a pectoral pectoral fin and the spine going back now it comes off the rock but you didn't throw the other side how about that i'm gonna learn something so i unfortunately we have this fracture here we're gonna have to separate it transport it but what we need to do is we need to just take this whole chunk this whole chunk right in there um i will let you do the honors oh that scares me oh you want me to do no i think i can okay but hold on one second question yeah yeah bring it on sharks are really important in this formation right why are sharks so important here they're so the sharks in this formation are extremely rare they're rarely preserved in the fossil record and this time kind of represents the big explosion and diversification of early chondrichthyan sharks so this isn't the dawn of sharks but this is right when sharks just like exploded and was filling all kinds of niches yep as many ecological niches as they could fill so that's a super cool find in terms of you know rarity how how often do you find sharks here uh so i'm lucky to find two to three sharks a year and usually there's only one i got lucky last year i had two good sharks a year before i had one yeah this year i haven't i haven't found a shark yet this is the first one so what species of shark is that i'm not sure but there is uh there is a type of shark i'm gonna have to look at publications and all that but it's referred to as the flying shark okay they have really really long pectoral fins which would actually match this one um so i mean i'm not too sure at the moment and we're gonna have to look at pictures could it be a new species oh it's very possible very very if it's a new species can we call it uh chase a finest you we can call it whatever you want just history raucous whatever you want yes pipe ends all right so let's um yeah but you set that to the side yeah is there anything else here we need to collect um so there was one little fragment you can see it right there i couldn't find it i think it actually there's enough gap and it was thin i think it did tuck so we want to be really careful as we absolutely and we don't actually want to expose the rest of the shark gotcha boy that we're gonna take this whole piece that says fracture but start by getting this really flaky layer so we can see where the fracture goes okay should continue so there's the fracture right there so come in close guys this is really important so the rock has natural fractures in it and so what we're doing is is we are exposing the rock so that we can physically see the natural fracture in the rock that way we will safely extract if all goes to plan we will safely extract this panel out and be able to transport it back yeah exactly this would be very easy yep yep come in back here all right so we've got another natural fracture going right there pull this one out to leave it a little okay who knows you might get lucky with another shark i know wouldn't that be awesome all right a mating pair okay so i don't think we got some it's this section so i believe it's down in this one okay let me see this okay this was oh yeah right there right nope yeah it can get tough if you don't pay attention well this is you're doing three-dimensional puzzles i mean this is incredibly difficult yeah rotate around the other way yeah i think you're correct chase somewhere okay there we go i think that edge goes here because it has those squiggles the waves push yeah take it yeah there you go okay okay so perfect so we're looking at the depth of the rock yeah and this would be you know what we're just going to go ahead and take all these pieces okay yep that's the easiest thing to do yep i think so did you find it you can faintly see it you see that there the little stain yep you can faintly so this is the side we want boom so what you got to keep in mind guys is that it's been raining non-stop just about every single day for the past two weeks three weeks and so we've been digging in the breaks in this weather we've got a very short digging season which means we've got to dig when the weather's warm enough the trees out here are so bent over from snow load that they permanently are bent over i mean this is a high snow area so these rocks are incredibly saturated and it's been raining all day we didn't think we'd find anything that's why the stupid camera was left way the heck down at camp you know however many billion miles away so this rock is incredibly wet and incredibly what we term as rotten rock so to find that in the first place was just like a miracle but i just want to show you what we're working through i went through this much rock just to get down to this level our shark was found here and this rock is still wet and rotten you can see you can see how wet and rotten this rock is and just how easily it peels but we're hoping for what we got is that because this rock is so wet if we dig very carefully we will get more separations out of this rock than we normally could and it turns out we were correct our shark is that fine that this was a good idea to come up here we just should have brought the stupid camera so anyway matt's gonna get that fossil back down to camp we're gonna get it wrapped up and protected so that it can survive its trip to the prep lab so we're really we're really excited a lot of this stuff when it's exposed it's just like that shark where you've got stuff underneath how do you prep this out so a lot of this uh i'll use a pneumatic scribe and we'll use abrasion and all that um but then certain pieces like your shark is probably going to go this way it i don't trust myself so i have my buddy ben cooper he is a magician with this stuff and any he can prep anything so i've heard a lot of good things about ben he in my opinion he's the best preparator in in the country no yeah no he is awesome so i'll send stuff to him because i know 100% of the time it will come back as good as it can be it'll be done it'll be done right it'll be done professionally and it his hands are the bad like you said magic oh yeah his hands are the best hands to prep very fragile very valuable in scientific wise monetarily wise pieces this is the guy that you cool ben fingers crossed it turns out next time on chasing history we return to the cliffs of the bear gulch limestone as the search for fossils becomes more dangerous and more rewarding than ever before as new dig sites are opened across the basin the team uncovers rare fish then back at camp matthew harrell sits down with us to break down the science behind the discoveries using decades of research and scientific publications to identify fossils that may even represent species completely new to science this is some of the best pine tar you're filming i have ever seen you don't see pine tar like this dude this is i gotta get me a bag yeah and like bag this stuff up this is freaking gold look at this i bet this species we can cut a little hole and i'll start to use it out so what's special about the pine tar chase well it's really hard to find good quality pine tar uh the western a lot of your western trees have a denser flow of tar than a lot of your eastern ones and i don't know why that is but so you take it you let it dry out and crush it into a powder and heat it up and you can make it into a pitch or a glue it's some of the best glue you'll ever see i mean we'll just feel yeah yeah no i've used it for fire starting before it's great man great for fire starters actually we'll take this down and we'll start our fire so so how long have we been using pine tar pine tar has probably been used for you know i think the oldest evidence they've got of it is like eight or nine thousand years old don't quote me on that but i'm sure we were using it for a lot freaking wall wow 20 or 30 thousand so would it be possible to use it as a lubricant where are we going with this we changed roles i'm just like all right what do i ask next um no okay not be a good lubricant okay well it'd be sticky icky yeah you i mean you never know when you might need to grease your wheels that not this stuff okay if we were to put it on that uh on that track vehicle behind us dude that would that would ruin it that would ruin it but what's cool is so this was the indians that were here uh we've got the black feet the cheyenne and the crow were all in this area and um and they uh this was their supermarket i mean this is basically me you know going to the supermarket and getting some glue they would have used this so anything that you would use glue today they use that they use that for so it does it withstand heat very well or yeah oh yeah yeah once you solid it up dude it's pretty good how do you solid it up you just let it dry oh like that yeah that's it takes an intense fire to liquid it up again um you can mix mix it with some people mix it with there's all kinds of recipes and stuff you mix it with charcoal and all this other kind of stuff gotcha but yeah cool uh do you need a bag i'll get one i'm just okay all right there's our hero there's the hero of our film name is matthew harrell run away otherwise known as captain and uh lovely dog dima the destroyer dima the destroyer there'll be nothing left but bones and then she will crush the bones with her jaws oh yeah oh hold on one second your mic's still hot so everything that you guys are saying is getting recorded turn that off oh i'm gonna figure out what you said you're you're saying some bad stuff behind my back i know you are it's on film now buddy you're you're shot you are busted or whatever sweet nothing yeah you're you're talking about to each other oh no no we don't need to get into that not not in this video okay okay all right so isaac pick up from here