paleontology

This summer, Austin Hendy, an assistant curator at the Natural History Museum who specializes in invertebrate paleontology, spent hours sifting and sorting through thousands of fossilized shells found in the shell bed.

“That’s always the case with paleontology: The field gets to this boundary and then we just set up camp and hang around until somebody makes some new methodological break, and we advance,” Barden says.

After its death around 67 million years ago, it was entombed in the Hell Creek Formation, a popular paleontology playground that spans Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas.

Babin said that his training in paleontology and dentistry helped him recognize that what seems like a strange rock at first glance is actually an upper jaw bone and teeth.

So they co-created a paleontology college course, in which the only assignment for the entire semester was studying porcupine bones.