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Hell Creek, Montana - Spring 2002
From May to July of 2002, a total of 40 eager Burpee Museum
staff members and volunteers will make the journey to Hell Creek to excavate Jane.
The Hell Creek environment is aptly named, but the team's mission,
to unearth Jane, is a labor of love. When it rains, it's muddy and
slippery, and the truck gets stuck. When the sun shines, it's hot and dry.
When the wind blows, it's sandy and gritty. There are mosquitoes, black flies,
no-seeums and rattlesnakes. The rugged terrain shreds the truck's tires during
the jouncing 60-minute drive to and from the dig.
Base camp is the Midway Motel in Ekalaka, Montana, population 450. The seven
rooms have shag carpeting, TVs and hot showers, but no phones. Nevertheless,
it feels like heaven after a day at the dig. The nearest ATM is 30 minutes
in the other direction. The Old Stand Bar stops serving food at 9 p.m.; when you
work late, your only option is the peanut butter and crackers in your room.
It takes three arduous weeks to excavate about four tons of earth to get to
the first layer of bone. When the team members find the lower jaw and serrated
teeth, they whoop and holler and dance around the dig site, because they realize
Jane is a member of the tyrannosaurid family, either a Nanotyrannus (pygmy tyrant)
or a half-grown Tyrannosaurus rex. Both are exceedingly rare. Up until now, the only
evidence of a Nanotyrannus has been a skull in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
And if Jane is a juvenile T. rex, she is by far the most complete one ever found.
It's unprecedented for such a small museum to discover, restore and own a dinosaur of this magnitude.
Some want to buy it. Others offer to restore it for a hefty fee. But "the little museum that could"
decides to keep it and restore it in-house.
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Camp Needmore in Ekalaka, Montana served
as base camp for the Burpee Museum crew
that discovered Jane.
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Burpee volunteer, Joe Peterson, cleans away
the top layer of dirt from Jane's bones.
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Jane's right jaw emerges from the rocky
matrix surrounding it.
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Burpee's team works to expand the Jane dig site.
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