[Narrator] Since the skeleton is buried on a slope,
their first task is to dig into the hill to create a flat work area.
[Eggenbroad] A lot of times you're trying to solve a mystery like, "What is this bone?"
or uh "What part of this beast?", or "What, what beast are we looking at?"
[Archaeologist] This is the sort of, front top part of the face of the animal, the skull. I'm trying to
uncover the bone there and get an idea of just where we are and what parts we're looking at.
Helps to get an idea of how how loose the stuff is and
let it, the stuff that'll just come loose naturally. Do it without poking at it, just poking at the bone.
[Archeaologist] I'm not a dentist but if you want to pull the roots up probably take some of the bone with it and destroy
some of the skeletons. So we cut the plant off the root and we'll take the roots out one at a time
with dental picks. [Eggenbroad] Since the boon is tribal you can break it. What we want to do is, let's put an
artificial preservative in it. In this case, it's a plastic resin. We mix it very thin with acetone,
pour or brush it into the bone, the acetone takes it in, it's the carrier
and it quickly evaporates and leaves the resin inside which then hardens. Well the skull is
beginning to take shape for us now because this was a big guest spot when we came here.
This little bone right here where louise is uh brushing, yeah it would be like the bridge of
our nose. The excitement lies in things like this, little uh bone. That's shown back here is going to
be one of the test sockets probably the left one and is the test going to be there? we don't know
yet. We're gonna have to remove a lot more dirt before we can determine that. Okay what we've done
is simply take the ice plant off, cut a shelf down so that we're getting close to bone. I'm
seeing the pelvis back here, the sacrum here. This is one half the pelvis. The other half's down here.
You're going right up the backbone in the position where Louise is at you have the
two shoulder blades or scapula right up the neck and you have a partially damaged cranium.
The far side shows uh the nasal opening and we have a part of one tusk socket showing whether
or not there will be ivory is anybody's guess. Right now that'll be the 64 dollar question for tomorrow.
[Narrator] After the first day of excavation Larry, Louise, Don and Tom are still hopeful
but it's the meticulous work in the days ahead, with dental picks and brushes that will tell
them what they really want to know. Will they unearth a complete skeleton of the pygmy mammoth?