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By Scott Williams, June 26, 2010 1:57 pm

Well, our time is growing short at the Hanksville-Burpee Quarry.  As much as I would like to stay and continue excavating bones at this amazing site, I need to get back to the museum, catch my breath and then head up to Carter County to continue our fieldwork there. I sometimes wish I could clone myself to be at both places at once.   Wrapping up a site is fairly unglorious.  It involves a lot of trenching, plastering, backfilling, lifting, sweating and so on.   Since there are only three of us left, the work gets doubled.  We will be putting the quarry to bed until next year.  One of the fun parts of this wrap up includes shaking down our new field vehicle.  Burpee acquired this “new” vehicle from one of our friends in Hanksville.  The vehicle is a 1986 GMC Sierra Classic Suburban….and it is great.  It can seat 8 people fairly comfortably and has a ton of trunk space.  Decent 8 ply tires, a trailer hitch, made of metal inside and out….just what we need.  We have nicknamed it Earl, after Earl Douglass, the famed paleontologist who discovered Dinosaur National Monument.  Anyhow, time to get back to work.