英語聽力：恐龍是怎樣煉成的—5

Amazingly less than 100 meters away, there are more clues to the past. Luis’ colleague has found the remains of a sauropod.

There’s a piece of rib here that’s going into the ground about this angle. And then there’s a piece of the pubis, the hip bone right here. And it’s almost complete, save for just the very back end which has already started to weather off.

Luis has to decide what to do with these finds. Starting a new dig is huge undertaking requiring time and money, and he has limited resources.

We already have 2 very good sites with long-neck dinosaurs. And we’re a little reluctant to, you know, open another excavation.

Just half a mile away is one of their sites. Luis’ team began working it a year ago. Most of the bones are still embedded in the rock, and must be painstakingly excavated. Luis knows from the layer of rock they’re digging that these dinosaurs died 150 million years ago. But he doesn’t know what species it is, and it’s potentially a dinosaur which has just never been seen before.

We’re actually collecting in an area that has not been sampled and no one has really worked here before. The possibility of having a new species is very, very exciting.

A fossil dig is like a murder scene—every piece of evidence about what happened 150 million years ago has to be salvaged. The layout of the entire site will be mapped and the precise location of every bone fragment recorded to help piece together the remains. The more complete the skeleton, the easier it will be to identify, and the greater the likelihood that this dinosaur will be turned into an exhibit.

We have hind limbs, we have forelimbs, we have a lot of the tail, we have ribs, we have many parts of the skeleton and now we’re starting to uncover the neck. I would anticipate that we’re gonna have to keep opening the quarry to uncover many other neck vertebrae and hopefully the skull.