A few months ago Dr. Andrew McDonal joined the staff of WSC as our new curator. Andrew has been excavating for several years in the Cretaceous Menefee Formation on federal land in New Mexico, and now some of that material is making its way to WSC. This morning we opened our first Menefee Formation field jacket on public view at the museum’s Exploration Station. The image above shows the jacket after about 3 hours of prep work. The jacket contains a ceratopsian rib, the posterior edge of which is visible running through the middle of the jacket from the left end to about 10 cm past the top of the scale bar. The rib actually continues all the way to the other end of the jacket, but we’ve not yet uncovered it that far. The small black specks dotting the sediment are fragments of charcoal from burned Cretaceous trees.Andrew tells me that this rib is part of an associated skeleton including at least a dozen bones, from a small, probably juvenile, ceratopsian. So far we don’t know what taxon it represents, but there’s still a lot of material to prepare. This rib will be on public view in the Exploration Station for the next few weeks as we continue our preparation work.