I was watching a documentary of how paleontologists dig for and collect dinosaur fossils and was amazed at the amount of time, effort, hard work, and patience these people have to put in each day. Blasting out pieces of rock and then chiseling out the smaller pieces encasing a fossil without damaging it is not something I would ever be good at or want to do. Luckily, there are people that love to do this work like Dr. Sweetman. I just read this article describing his excavation of dinosaur fossils on the Isle of Wight (off the southern coast of England). He has found at least 8 new dinosaurs and many other types of species that lived in the age of the dinosaurs in 4 years of work. He accomplished this by first carrying about 4 tons of mud along beaches and cliffs in buckets and backpacks. Then, he would drive these samples back to his lab/farm (he grew up there, moved to the mainland for 25 years, and moved back to carry out this research). The species he discovered were pretty small in size (running at the feet of the dinosaur), so most of his samples were just single grains of sand that he would analyze under a microscope looking for something resembling a fossil. Amazing!
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