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Podcast Episode 4, Story Time With Dave: Cracking Open the Story of Egg Mountain

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Episode Transcript

Dave Trexler: Okay. I promised to talk about Egg Mountain. When we were out originally in 1978 or 79, the area that we were looking at was back in about a half a mile from the road, and that area in 1980 was actually being surveyed by a company that was contracted to find potential oil domes in the area and they were running seismic lines.

Dave Trexler: And in 1980, Jack had a, a fairly large field crew out with him and he had nothing for them to really do. And when, when you have 10 or 12 people out there volunteering, and you have a, a quarry that five people can work on…

Stacia Coverdell: The size of this table!

Dave Trexler: What do you do with the other people? Well, you, you assign them tasks, and Jack hit on this brilliant idea.

Dave Trexler: They had just laid this seismic line. And he said to a couple of the people, “What I would like you to do is go and walk along that seismic line and see if there’s any fossil material that they’re gonna drive over testing along this line. And….

Stacia Coverdell: Full skeleton, just crushed.

Dave Trexler: There you go.

Dave Trexler: And, it was a really, actually a brilliant use of volunteers. That, you didn’t have other places for. So he was, he sent some of ’em out and, and one of them was a, a lady by the name of Fran Tannenbaun

Dave Trexler: And she’s walking this line actually right by the county road; comes up over this little hill and here’s these really interesting black circles or oblongs in, in this sandstone that that’s on the top of this hill and it looks like fossil material. So goes and gets Jack and it happens to be the very first dinosaur eggs found in North America. And all of a sudden now there is actually a, a real reason not to have the, the seismic truck running over the top of this hill.

Dave Trexler: So they did get ahold of the seismograph company and talked them into moving the line a bit and actually started digging in this really hard rock to recover.

Stacia Coverdell: So, when I’m out there, cause one of our dig sites is only like two or three miles away. There’s eggshell everywhere. Like it’s really concentrated around the, the nest that we’ve found, but I mean, it’s, it’s everywhere. So had you seen eggshell before and recognized it as such or was it just this black stuff on the ground?

Dave Trexler: Actually, it was out there, but it looked a lot like little bits of shale ‘cuz shale flakes and, and that and, and also in various areas there’s broken up fossilized shell sea shell material .

Dave Trexler: That looks a lot like that. And really no one was thinking about eggs, as such. We,

Stacia Coverdell: But if there’s babies…

Dave Trexler: And we did once we found babies in 78 then, were these live birth or were they hatched? And we started looking for eggshell and in that area, it really wasn’t as common to find eggshell as it is in some of the other places like you visited. Well picture the area up in our twin hill site, you know? There’s one locality there where eggshell is all over the ground. But you walk the rest of the bad lands there and there really ins’t any. It’s it’s pretty sparse.

Dave Trexler: And for the most part where we were working down near Egg Mountain, it was pretty sparse. Probably it was not as sparse as we thought it was. But when you’re looking for bones, you don’t see eggshell. When you’re looking…

Stacia Coverdell: That’s true.

Dave Trexler: …for bones, you don’t see teeth. It has to do with, you see what you’re looking for.

Stacia Coverdell: That’s true. And even when we’re looking for eggshell, sometimes you can’t find it

Dave Trexler: There is that, if the sun isn’t hitting it…

Dave Trexler: …just right. It doesn’t show up. But, all of the forces aligned for Fran and she found the first intact eggs. So we had found, like I said, bits and pieces, but those were the, the first intact eggs.

Dave Trexler: And they started, excavating on the hill and there’s a heck of a lot of stuff that is overburdened. It it’s dross. It’s the the stuff you have to get rid of to get to the good stuff. And you don’t want to pilot where you might have to dig again, if , nest progress that direction or whatever

Stacia Coverdell: but if you do, that’s what interns are for

Dave Trexler: But the, the crew came up with this really cool idea. They set a sheet of plywood or two. And through their tailings onto the sheets of plywood and, and then they’d use their feet to push the tailings down further on the hill, sliding it over on, on the plywood.

Dave Trexler: Because it would slide easier on the plywood than over the… and so, , the hill’s fairly steep and if you did it right, you could actually shove this stuff down while standing up. and, and sometimes you’d actually get a little bit of slide going even. And one of the crew thought that was so cool that she went to Great Falls and had a custom made t-shirt that said ski egg mountain.

Dave Trexler: And because Big Mountain up here was the area premier ski.

Stacia Coverdell: Okay.

Dave Trexler: So instead there was all kinds of t-shirts at that time out “Ski Big Mountain”. So she just had to change to, to

Stacia Coverdell: Egg Mountain,

Dave Trexler: Egg Mountain, and the name stuck. So this little bitty hill, along this side, the road is now Egg Mountain.

Stacia Coverdell: Yeah. Most people think so the sign out on the highway that says Egg Mountain, it it’s on a big hill. So that’s Seven Mile Hill, not Egg Mountain.

Dave Trexler: Right. And a nice set of bad lands. Privately owned people trespass all the time that since they put up that sign, it’s been a real problem for the landowner. But the actual Egg Mountain site is 12 miles from that sign as the Crow flies.

Stacia Coverdell: If you don’t know where it is, you can’t really see it.

Dave Trexler: No.

Stacia Coverdell: Well, even if you do know it, where it is, you can’t really see.

Dave Trexler: I, I can point to it. And with the set of binoculars, you can, you can see it kind of , but yeah, and they did that for a reason, the Egg Mountain area, as of 2003, I believe as of 1995, that site was actually purchased as a, a part of a deal with Nature Conservancy and, and the Peebles ranch family and Nature Conservancy took over that square mile area there with all the bad lands on it.

Dave Trexler: And then in 2003, the Nature Conservancy sold that chunk to Museum of the Rockies.

Stacia Coverdell: So…?

Dave Trexler: So it it’s, it’s, it’s still independently owned if you will. It’s not part of the US government or, or anything. And Museum of the Rockies in itself is a 501(c) just like we are. And we could not afford to have somebody patrol our land out when we’re not working out there and, and neither can Museum of the Rockies. So the, the only way they have to really protect their site is to not let a lot of people know where it’s at.

Dave Trexler: And that highway sign serves two purposes: it tells the story and it slightly misdirects so that it. And put a pin in the map and say, go trespass here. But the really cool thing for me is that’s just one of many of those sorts of sites that we have found scattered throughout the Two Medicine Formation. Unfortunately, between landowners who don’t want to allow scientists to work on their property or don’t want to be bothered in general.

Stacia Coverdell: Well, I imagine there’s a lot of distrust there.

Dave Trexler: There is still… it’s getting better that way, but the bigger thing is a lot of them just don’t want to be bothered. And that was the original agreement with peoples, , we don’t want to be bothered with this, so you, , supervise them for us.

Dave Trexler: And that’s a big thing with a lot of our current landowners, we are required to patrol, report any trespassers pull up any weeds that might have been something we dragged in on.

Stacia Coverdell: Can’t take our vehicles up certain roads, walk in a straight line that…

Dave Trexler: Yeah, there’s, there’s a reason why we make that little path and, and don’t just wander across the field when we’re

Stacia Coverdell: …and carry 50 pound bags of plaster, half a mile to the dig site and,

Dave Trexler: Yep, exactly weeds are a, a big problem on the prarie, and when we’re just realizing, how easily they’re transported. So a lot of, of, of landowners are very concerned that… and ideally we would have a, a car wash station at the edge of their property and, and blast off every chance of, a little piece of pollen. So there there’s a lot of that.

Dave Trexler: The other thing that’s, that’s really impeding our work is salvation of, of other things really means the demise of certain things. I have watched dinosaurs and nests and eggs erode away and not be able to touch them because rules of government agencies who have taken easements or other agencies who have taken easements. There’s Nature’s Conservancy, it preserves grasslands.

Dave Trexler: They do not let you dig. So you cannot recover fossils from their land and they make exceptions for outstanding areas like Egg Mountain, but it’s almost impossible to get permission to dig anywhere else. In fact…

Stacia Coverdell: How do you find another Egg Mountain if you can’t dig it?

Dave Trexler: Well, the answer is you don’t. It erodes away. We had a neighbor that we had a, a site on their property when Nature Conservancy took their, took an easement, and the landowner wanted to do that… Nature Conservancy wanted them to do some reseeding because continued drought had killed off some patches, but the landowner wanted to go in and, and , plow a couple of little test areas and do different mixes to test, which one would go better be the, the best to spread out and, and work overall and the Nature Conservancy representatives said, no, you can’t do that.

Dave Trexler: Because you’re not allowed to disturb that soil surface, even for that purpose. And they, they argued for days over and finally his wife had a stroke genius. He said if I read our agreement right, garden spots are exempted from this and the representative says, yes, they are. She says, fine. We’re gonna put a garden spot there, there, and there. They…

Dave Trexler: Was she a gardener?

Dave Trexler: No, they did their test beds that way. The, some of these are so strict. The, that one Nature Conservancy easement the road to their house washed out. They weren’t allowed to rebuild the road because they would’ve had to disturb grass that had not already been disturbed with the existing road,

Stacia Coverdell: But there was a road there!

Dave Trexler: Yeah.

Stacia Coverdell: So how would they get to their house?

Dave Trexler: Well, there was a second road and the Nature Conservancy said, that one is an improved gravel road. See that the problem is that house is in a coulee. The improved gravel road is pretty much straight off the hill. But when the winter got really bad, there was this old two track that was the original homestead road that kind of sidled/ angled up the hill. And, and it was just a, , a cart trail and a single plow through there. And part of it got eroded. So it was impassable and they wanted to just come back in and, and, , redo the cut. They said,, absolutely not. That’s, that’s not your designated road. You are not disturbing it. So you, if, if they have that sort of problem with, with things like that, you can imagine, what we have to go through.

Dave Trexler: If, if we want to permit to actually excavate. A fossil on, on what they do. And we run into similar there’s a lot of, of easements out there now for wildlife management, they would let us dig on those easements, but they don’t want us out there because we might disturb the wild animals they’re trying to protect and, and whatnot .

Dave Trexler: So for one reason or another paleontology really suffers. Whenever we’ve got these easements in place, because they really prevent us from doing our work, not even to get into public lands and, and yeah, that’s, that’s a whole nother can of worms. If you are not one of the, the select few organizations that are recognized re regional or national reposit.

Dave Trexler: It’s almost impossible to get a permit to work on federal lands. And for the state of Montana, the state has one repository. It expects all of its fossils to be in that repository. And it really doesn’t want to deal with anything else. So it’s either dig and go to that repository where it can lay out there in the roadway and they don’t care.

Dave Trexler: Which is one of those other things that I have been bugging the government for years about. I have been very vocal, very active, and every time I go and meet with the folks down in Helena, they smile and nod and nothing ever happens.

Stacia Coverdell: Yeah.

Dave Trexler: So, but we’ll keep trying. Anyway, that was a lot of tangents end the story of Egg Mountain, so…

Stacia Coverdell: yeah, what did- what was found on Egg Mountain?

Dave Trexler: Oh! Egg Mountain, eggs turned out to be a new type of egg. You can tell differences in animals that laid eggs based on the pattern in the egg shell itself. So if you put a chicken egg under a microscope and put a turkey egg section under a microscope, looking at them on the, on the surface, you might not be able to tell which is which, but under the microscope you can tell, which is which, and these eggs turned out to be something new.

Dave Trexler: It’s not a pattern seen in the eggs that had been found years ago in Mongolia or France, and they found this really cool little plant-eating dinosaur skeleton in amongst the eggs. The little nondescript bipedal hypsilophodon , dont that they named orodromeus, literally means mountain murderer. And so initially the story was that orodromeus had this nesting colony and they’ve also found some troodon remains. And..

Stacia Coverdell: And troodon kind of looks like velociraptor.

Dave Trexler: Yep. Pretty much. It’s a little medium and smaller than, than orodrome by quite a bit. They had found a, a skeleton earlier of, of troodon that was kind of half a skeleton and the other half was just pulverized and the, the thought was it’s I don’t think ever been published, but one of the things Jack used to like to say is…

Stacia Coverdell: The thing going around the big site?

Dave Trexler: …is this troodon happened to be stealing egg or baby from one of the maiasaura nests close by and mommy, maia caught him and, and just stomped him into dust basically because he was stealing babies?

Dave Trexler: So it was natural to think, , here’s, here’s our orodromeus nest and the troodon remains were, egg-stealers, or baby-stealers coming in to grab a free meal.

Dave Trexler: And at this point, the, the nest and the flaming cliffs with the oviraptor. Did they still think that the oviraptor was an egg-thief or did they know that those nests belonged to oviraptor, at that point?

Dave Trexler: Nope. In Mongolia at that point in time, the Roy Chapman Andrews picture of protoceretops eggs and, and mommies and, and what have you there with the oviraptor coming and, and stealing the eggs whenever they had a chance was, was still the picture.

Stacia Coverdell: Okay. So yeah, it would be logical to think that troodon was just stealing things.

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