ML139331
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Subject: (Interview). Subtitle: Erv Garrison. Timecode In: 00:01:42. Timecode out: 00:36:12. Notes: Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary; Fossil diving. Habitat: Marine, Ocean. Equipment Notes: Stereo=1; Decoded MS stereo. NPR/NGS RADIO EXPEDITIONS Log of 2way with Erv Garrison and Chris Joyce Gray's Reef DAT #2 MS sennheisers 40s and 30s. inside the Rycote with a (rat?) .. into Sony D3. 1:37 -start of 2way CJ -tell me why you have to wear gloves to touch these bones? EG -~they are scientific samples and they do undergo examination you have got stuff on your hands, mostly just sweat and one thing you don't want to is you are doing any chemical examinations even though we do pre-treat the bones when we do the things~..we treat them with a little care and gloves seem to be just a small price to pay for handling fossils. 2:37 CJ -so let's have a look at these bones and see what they tell us. EG -alright. We will get your favorite out here and we will bring out one of the latest ones that Bruce Caldon had found. (looking around) this is the bison medapode (?) that we talked about before. It seems to be the least fossilized of the bones if you compare the real dark pacnation (?) and heavy fossilization of this bone as opposed to this one. This one still looks pretty much like a bone where this one looks somewhere btwn a bone and a rock. 3:16 CJ -now what part of the bison is this? EG -ah. It is actually the medapode or the foot of the -towards the hoof. It would be articulating then with the what we would consider to be fingers, this would be articulating with the hoof itself~.which I supposed is a modified finger. You can see the articulating surface here -this is I think one of the nicest fossils we have found bc I think most people can look at this one and immediately say -"oh!" we don't have to -you know -we hold this one up and say, you know, name this and someone might say well, that is just a rock. But if you look at it closely you can see basically the same kind of architecture as the bison bound -you have got a -the interior portion here which is concave and you know -you can visualize completing the bone and then you got a smoother exterior here. It is a good fossil. CJ -you are diving 60' under the water. It is visibility is probably not very good. There is sand, there is silt on this stuff. How can you possibly pick this out from the rest of the stuff on the bottom? 4:40 EG -I guess you are cueing on certain elements. You are cueing on shapes. I know that Bruce and reed and I maybe not so intuitively but understand that there are certain shapes in nature that aren't found very often. I think bones and fossils represent a shape that we don't often see on the bottom of the ocean. So we can be fooled. There are a couple of items in this bag which clearly (bg: rustling through bag) could be construed for instance -is this a bone or is this a rock -or what is it? As opposed to this where there is absolutely no question but there is enough ambiguity in this particular piece that we have to pick it up just in case that it might be a fossil. But I think it is just the difference that we pick on. John Van Newman who is the great theorists on the mathematical theory of communications is not the noise we listen for -it is that little peak of information -and it is the difference to all of the sound we hear at anytime. So maybe this is the visual equivalent of that anomaly that stands out that carries that bit of information. 6:17 CJ -let's go back a little bit and talk about gr as an archeological site. In essence, the way I think of it is as a time capsule. 6:47 EG -gr is a portion of our most recent history and I think I am talking in the geologically sense in the last 50 to one thousand years. And not so long ago, again from a geological sense of time that was open grass lan... (Notes truncated)
Technical information
- Recorder
- SONY TCD-D3
- Microphone
- Sennheiser MKH 30; Sennheiser MKH 40
- Accessories
Archival information
- Cataloged
- 20 May 2005 - Ben Brotman
- Digitized
- 20 May 2005 - Ben Brotman
- Edited
- 20 May 2005 - Ben Brotman