The sea was red and the sky was grey, wondered how tomorrow could ever follow today.

Today we got started on our osteological study. We’re going by class and we started with fishes. We’re just doing the bony fish, which makes sense, as cartilaginous fishes don’t have much of a skeleton. I’m awfully fond of fish. I think they’re fascinating creatures, perfectly evolved to survive in their environment. Also, they have pharyngeal jaws. Do you know what else has pharyngeal jaws?

Aliens.

We spent all of our lab time today studying fish. I’m going back to the lab later this evening to look at the skeletal collection some more. Maybe I’ll take some pictures, but really, the fish skeletons are going to have a hard job adding up to the landscape pictures I’m getting. Fish are really interesting, though, and useful in an archaeological setting. They have a high seasonality- basically, if you find fish at a site, you know that the site was inhabited at a certain time of the year from what kind of fish you find there. For example, let's say that you find a lot of adult salmon remains at an inland site that's far from the ocean. You know that that site was inhabited in the late fall, because that's the only time adult salmon come inland. But let's say that you don't find any adult salmon. Let's say that you find subadult salmon. In that case, you know that the site was inhabited in the late spring and early summer, because that's when the baby salmon make their way back downstream to live in the ocean. And if you find a mix of salmon, it's likely that the site was occupied for the better part of the year. Fish are also a good indicator of what a past environment was like because they need a specific temperature and pH range to thrive.

You can tell a lot about humans from the animals they interact with. The animals I most enjoy interacting with up here are the dogs.

The dogs they have here make me wish I had a dog that, well, did dog things. My dog is small and not very doggy. These two are fantastic. Left is Camo, right is Bella.

Bella is the friendlier of the two. She’s a mostly-lab and wonderful. We were eating lunch today, and she decided to hop up on our picnic table and just chill. She didn’t beg for food (she got some of my turkey anyways), but she just wanted to hang out with us. That's one of my classmates, Rachel, in the picture up there. Much to my delight, I’ve discovered that I’m actually bonding with my classmates. This is actually somewhat unusual. Today at lunch, we were talking about our various experiences with flint-knapping. As the station director overheard us, he mentioned that there was a huge haul of obsidian about a quarter mile from the campsite. We spent our lunch break hiking out there and gathering hunks of the volcanic glass and set up a knapping station, where we started breaking down cores and teaching the rest of the class about flintwork. The plan is that we are going to try and make some arrows. One of the class, Uri, has a longbow that he brought with him. We’ll have to see what happens.

As we knapped, a butterfly came to visit us.

 Later on, we saw another one on the doorknob to the girls’ cabin.

 Before dinner, we went on a hike around the beach and into the juniper-sage habitat to see what we could find. Perhaps the most depressing thing we found was the remains of a Western Grebe entangled in fishing line. These birds, much like the Common Loon in Minnesota, were faced with extinction and have only recently been coming back in numbers. To see one dead this way was upsetting. I don’t have a picture of it. What I do have is pictures of the highlights of the hike.

This is a desiccated swim bladder, probably from a Rainbow Trout or a large sucker.

 This is an incomplete mule deer pelvis. It’s got saw marks; this animal was field dressed here. No telling how old these bones are.

This is a dusky-footed woodrat nest, more commonly called a midden. The dusky-footed wood rat is the area’s most common woodrat. Dusky-footed woodrat middens are amazing because the rats seal them with their urine. They reuse these structures for generations, and with every passing year the midden gets bigger and better-sealed. After a few decades (that's a lot of rat generations!), they abandon them and the middens go largely unused by any other species. The crystalized urine turns into a substance called amberat, which protects the midden and preserves its contents for thousands of years. We know what the vegetation around the station was like hundreds years ago thanks to preserved dusky-footed woodrat middens. Other woodrat and packrat species make these middens. They preserve even better in the desert; the oldest middens excavated have been up to ten thousand years old. Literally nothing is better for preserving the floral record. If you’d like to know more about dusky-footed woodrats, you can read about them here.

This is a mostly-intact, completely articulated Striped Skunk skull. The only thing it is missing is a few of its teeth; finding something like this is a real rarity. Usually, other scavengers have done a great deal of damage to it by this point. It's lost all of its soft tissue and has been bleached by the sun. We found the axis vertebra, but other than that, it is missing all of its postcranial elements.

Finally, I'm going to leave you with some more images from the field station It's getting late, and I need to go to bed.