Poorly-Preserved Boyfriend Entertains Turlock Paleontologist

This actually sounds interesting:

In a quiet campus laboratory, Susan Bowman brushes dirt and rock from bones 65 million years old. She's slowly putting together part of a giant sea lizard.

Bowman, a research intern for the Bureau of Land Management, took on the job after BLM natural resources specialist Ryan O'Dell discovered the fossils last summer in the Panoche Hills west of Firebaugh.

...Since bringing the rock to the Turlock campus, Bowman has been taking the shale apart, identifying and cataloguing bones. She thinks she's got her hands on part of a plesiosaur, an aquatic lizard that grew to as long as 60 feet, or about the size of a sperm whale.

...Working mostly alone -- her 11-year-old son Tyler is her research assistant, but he returned to school this week -- Bowman has assembled vertebrae, rib fragments and flanges, or flipper bones. She thinks only about a third of the creature was encased in the rock.

..."In the late Cretaceous period, California's coastline was 120 miles farther inland than today, and the Coast Range was a string of islands," Bowman said. "The remains of sea-dwelling organisms were swept against the east side of the Coast Range, sank to the ocean floor, became buried by layers of sediment and were fossilized."

Similar creatures have been found as far away as Antarctica, she said; many of them are better preserved in colder climates.

"We have really poor preservation in California," she said. "The way our climate is, it's not really conducive to really good preservation."

Bowman's internship with the Bureau of Land Management ends in October. But she's hoping to see it extended so she can continue working on the creature she jokingly refers to as "my boyfriend."

"I spend most of the day, every day with him," she said.