Background

The science of palaeontology has set itself the task of unraveling the history of life on Earth by studying the tracks, traces and body fossils of creatures that lived on Earth millions of years ago. It asks questions such as: "Why are there fossils of similar kinds of dinosaurs in China and Alberta? "; or "How did fins evolve into legs, and arms into wings? ". The answers are very complex, hard to discover, and involve a great deal of work.

My work focuses on the evolutionary history of snakes and their relatives. Publication of my previous research on snakes found in 100 million-year-old rocks in the Middle East and on the northern shore of the Mediterranean led to an invitation in December 1997 from Dr. Adriana Albino of the Departmento Biología, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina, to join her in studying the Cretaceous snake Dinilysia patagonica.

So, off I went to Argentina on a typical research trip for a palaeontologist, to:

1. study previously collected specimens housed in museum collections;
2. give presentations on the current state of knowledge in my field;
3. conduct fieldwork in hot, dry, dusty deserts looking at rocks and scanning the ground for fossils;
4. write up the results of my investigations.

September 30 to October 4
I left Ottawa on September 30, spent 22 hours in transit and arrived in Buenos Aires -- exhausted. The next day I went to the Museo Bernadino Rivadavia to study its collections of fossil snakes. In early 1998 José Bonaparte, the principal at the Museo,

This specimen in the collections of the Museo Bernadino Rivadavia is the best known articulated specimen of Dinilysia patagonica and includes a skull and about 140 vertebrae.

had collected six new skulls and two skeletons of Dinilysia. Until then, only one specimen had ever been collected.

Three days later I traveled by bus to La Plata, the capital of Buenos Aires Province. Argentinean colleagues and I planned to attend the "VII Congresso Argentino de Paleontologia y Bioestratigrafia" in the coastal city of Bahia Blanca, where I was to give a talk. We piled into Sergio Vizcaino's 1980 Ford Falcon, headed south across the vast grassy plains of the Pampas and arrived 12 hours later.

October 5 to 9
On the morning of the first day of the conference, I finally met Dr. Albino. Prior to this introduction all of our communications and collaborations had been via the Internet. The conference went well, with our talk well received. We spent a great deal of time discussing future projects and answering questions from students.

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