Crime Show or Chess Game?

The plot thickens.  Take a look at this pile of bones.  (The view is from the front of the tortoise, looking down on it.) How does one make sense of it all?  Well, the bone outlined in green is either a humerus or a femur. (Bones may have shifted around a bit 75,000 years ago when Basilemys was unceremoniously  moved into his rock abode.) The bones outlined in purple are unidentified ones from previous weeks.  Blue outlines show pieces of shell.

This week as Jim started moving into the shell to work on a previously uncovered bone (the one circled in red, which is also not yet positively identified), he found two new bones below it. The bone peeking out (circled in yellow) from under the old mystery bone is one of the two new mystery bones.  The photo below shows them both circled in yellow.

This is still the front of the tortoise, but looking inside of it instead of over it.  Once again, the area outlined in blue is the shell.

Preparation is going to get more difficult with all these new bones inside of our tortoise.  To safely prepare an element, you must remove all the rock around it.  But when you have bones stacked on top of one another like we do with our tortoise, this can get a bit tricky. How can an element that’s attached to another element be prepared and gotten out of the way without damaging either one?

Next week the paleo team is going to spend time figuring out the answer to that question.  They will determine the order in which to remove the elements and figure out how to support the remaining ones after each piece is removed.

We hope to be back next week – depends on how long it takes to formulate the plan of attack.