Scientist at Work Blog: Fossil Hunting Near 'New York,' Brazil

April 20, 2012, 7:39 am By KEN ANGIELCZYK

Ken Angielczyk, an assistant curator at the Field Museum of Natural History, is searching for fossils of ancient mammal relatives in northeastern Brazil.

Tuesday, April 17

We?re staying in a quaint little town called Nova Iorque (Portuguese for New York) that was made by damming the Parna?ba River in 1969. Nova Iorque is located on the edge of a lake called Boa Esperan?a (Good Hope) ? the original location of the town is now underwater.

The town is just a few kilometers from the outcrops we?re working on at the moment, and there are a couple of little restaurants near the lake that make excellent food using local fish. According to Juan, the original (and now underwater) town of Nova Iorque was a port on the Parna?ba River that was used for shipping palm oil made from a variety of coconut that grows in the area. The engineer who designed the port was from New York, hence the name of the town.

It is the end of the rainy season in this area. The main advantages are that it is a bit cooler than the dry season, and the rain sometimes makes fossils easier to see by cleaning the outcrops off. The disadvantage is that when it rains, it really rains. We had a huge thunderstorm last night, which wasn?t too much of a problem except for a few leaks in the roof of our house.

We also got caught in a heavy downpour while we were out in the field this morning, and we ended up totally soaked. In fact, I?m writing this post around lunchtime as we are back at the houses trying to dry off our clothes and gear.

Staying in houses while doing fieldwork is a bit of a luxury (particularly since we can shower every day after work), but there aren?t many good areas to camp that are closer to the outcrops. The houses are located on the shore of the lake and provide nice views of the water at breakfast and of sunsets on the days we get back before dark.

Tomorrow our plan is to try to find a couple of localities where previous researchers collected fossils. These collections were made in the days before GPS systems, so they used local landmarks in the scientific papers to indicate where the specimens were from (for example, five kilometers from town, 300 meters east of the road). Using our GPS receivers and the satellite photos available on Google Earth, we can get a good general idea of where these places are, but it can be frustratingly difficult to be sure whether we?re in the right place. We also have some old photos from one of the scientists, which include features that can be used to differentiate one outcrop from another. They found some of the few terrestrial vertebrate fossils known from the Pedra de Fogo Formation at the localities, so it?s important for us to try to return to them to see whether more than 40 years of erosion has exposed any new material.

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