In our second morning in the Loarre course Técnicas de restauración en paleontología a través de la preparación de los huevos de dinosaurio de Loarre: Palaeontological Restoration Techniques through the preparation of Loarre dinosaur eggs, we met at 9:00 in the museum-lab Laboratorio Paleontológico de Loarre. The first thing we did was pick up our PPE – glasses, earplugs, facemask and work gloves. For the day we would be cared for by Miguel Moreno Azanza, Lope Ezquerro Ruiz, Ester Díaz Berenguer, Manuel Pérez Pueyo and Laura De Jorge i Aranda.

Miguel Moreno Azanza and Lope Ezquerro Ruiz are the course coordinators. The former is holds a PhD in Geology and is a Postdoctoral fellow in the Saragossa university Universidad de Zaragoza. He is the egg expert and the leader of the works in Loarre. Ezquerro Ruiz is now a Lecturer at another University, Universidad Complutense (Madrid), but he has not lost contact with the dino-egg world. He is the expert sedimentologist, described as an “all-terrain geologist”. Ester Díaz Berenguer did her doctorate about ancient manatees, once dug a sauropod skeleton all by herself, and is the Natural History collection curator in the Natural Science Museum of the University in Saragossa. Manuel Pérez Pueyo holds a postdoctoral position in the university Universidad del País Vasco and is currently away in Romania, studying the same kinds of sediments the Loarre eggs are found in – he is the K-Pg Limit expert. And finally, Laura De Jorge i Aranda is the de facto boss – she is the main restorer and conservation expert in the lab, so what she says, goes. If she ever stays still for long enough to finish saying it, because she must be related to the Duracell bunny…

We hopped onto the vans, and drove / bounced off towards the actual palaeontological site: Yacimiento de Santa Marina, the outcrop where the eggs were first found. Around 6 km away from the village, the area of the site is around 500 square metres, and eggs could be found from the surface (originally, those have been excavated now) to almost 2 m deep. It is mainly comprised of red clays hardened into actual rock, whose age is disputed between around 70 and 66 million years ago. Fragments of egg shells can be found on the surface, easy to tell apart. While the clays are mainly reddish, the egg shells are dark grey / blue, three millimetres wide, clearly rounded and with clearly-visible pores on the outer surface. And no, finding one of the dozens of them that we saw never got old. They have found six or seven groups of eggs there, so the upcoming steps are extracting them and working out if the groups are actual nests or just casual accumulations due to transport or other causes.

There were three jobs to do around the site – cleaning up an area where eggs had already been found to check for more, repairing a cast jacket which had been damaged, and extracting a cast jacket which was ready to be transported to the laboratory. I started with the clean-up team. There, we used the “small” equipment (cleaning brushes, paintbrushes, and screwdrivers) to remove sediment and small rocks trying to see if there were more eggs around or underneath the one that had been removed. It was a definite maybe.

The professors had brought Coke, Aquarius and pastries for breakfast at the mountain hut next to the hermit church Ermita de Santa Marina, which lends its name to the site, and thus we had a break around noon – the museum-lab team had brought us snacks and drinks. Afterwards, my group moved onto recasting a jacket which protects what could be a whole nest inside. The whole thing is massive and thus heavy, so difficult to move. While the logistics for that are being taken care of, the cast jacket protects the fossils inside, and the whole thing is kept buried to prevent weathering.

In Spanish, the cast jackets are called momias, mummies, as they are wrapped in gauze or similar before. Unfortunately, that degrades with time and weather. In order to protect the fossils, three of us applied a layer of cellulose (read: wet toilet paper) first, while the other two made burlap stripes that would go between the cellulose and the plaster. Later, another group would make and apply the new cast, and the following day the professors came back the next day to rebury it for extra protection.

My group’s final job was breaking a plaster cast off the ground. As we worked on the other two spots, the other groups had taken a hydraulic hammer and a giant drill to the rock surrounding the cast to get it ready for extraction.. I got to work on the drill – while one of my peers pushed the tool into the rock, I was in charge of keeping the drill bit steady. Afterwards, I could hammer one of the stone-splitting wedges into the holes we had drilled, and a group-mate hammered in the other two. The cast was labelled and extra information was written on it: level, north, which side was up. After that, the whole thing was torn off the stand (by sheer blunt force, aka someone pushing it) and rolled onto a net that had to be hauled up the outcrop and then into the van, all that under the incredulous look of a herd of free-range cows which grazed nearby.

The strongest people around loaded the cast and carried it out, then put it in the van. They needed someone to take pictures of the process and I volunteered for that. By then, it was way past 14:30, which meant we were too late to have lunch in Loarre, where apparently it is only served between 14:00 and 15:00. Calls were (sort of desperately) made to find somewhere which would feed our large group lunch. We ended up in the restaurant at the campsite Camping de Loarre, which happily let us have some food there. They offered stuff to share, but we preferred to have individual plates. I think we all wanted something we really… wanted, so we just chose from the main dish options.

I ordered fried eggs with ham and chips. While I prefer my eggs runny, they were adequate. Since I had drunk a Coke for breakfast, I had an isotonic drink instead, and some of the communal water. As I was finishing, I overheard that they had ice cream inside… watermelon ice cream. It was exactly what I needed for dessert. While I was paying, the waiter asked something about whom to charge for the water, so I took care of that. It was still cheaper than buying all the soda and snacks the professors ended up providing.

After lunch, we headed back towards the village, where we had a lecture by Laura De Jorge i Aranda on the theory of fossil restoration, conservation and preservation. One of the most important things she mentioned was documentation – as we had seen with the cast we had broken off. Once in the laboratory, the plaster is opened, the sediment classified for later study, the eggs cleaned mechanically and chemically, and any crack sealed with special glue. Every step of the way is documented. Finally, the fossils have to be packed for transport or preservation, and the sediment must be combed for anything of interest it might be hosting, such as loose egg shells (from either titanosaurs, crocodilians or theropods).

We moved then to the museum-lab to apply what we had just learnt in our first hands-on visit to the restoration laboratory. We were provided with a bunch of fossils (newly-discovered spinosaurid bones, so new that they are unpublished and thus cannot be shown) and Ester Díaz Berenguer guided us to make fossil beds with polyethylene covered with tissue. These were to go into fireproof drawers for conservation in the Natural Science Museum in Saragossa. The fossils are laid out on the polyethylene, traced, and the bed is carved for them with scalpels and cutters – remembering to also carve spaces for fingertips, so picking up the item is easier in the future.

After that, Miguel Moreno Azanza showed us some of the prepared eggs. One of the specimens was a couple of eggs stored together (one of them might have a baby inside!). These were found in another site, Collado de la Tallada, which apparently is “easier to dig in”, but we were playing level pro in Santa Marina. Another was a group of five eggs together, which could have been a nest. They are criss-crossed by mini-faults. We were able to snoop around other eggs, as the professors chuckled something like “Don’t worry, you’ll work on them tomorrow”.

When I signed up for the course, I expected that the “practice” would be standing there while an expert did something. Maybe we would all get one egg shell to touch and share amongst us. That would have been really cool already. But by now I had dug, protected, drilled, pushed, and held fossils. I was ecstatic. The course had blown up my mind already, and there were still two and a half days left.

I went back to the hotel Hospedería de Loarre to shower, have a snack, and pack all my things as I had to clear the room the following morning. I also studied off the route to get to Saragossa in the evening after the course. During the planning stage, I had considered whether I wanted to go to Saragossa on Friday morning before the lessons or Thursday evening after them, and in the end I decided to drive on Thursday.

On the one hand, it meant driving after the whole day of class, probably tired, and around dusk. On the other hand, it allowed me to do the drive without a time limit constraint, park directly at the hotel, and it might mean less traffic. Furthermore, sunset was at 21:00, and it should be bright enough for a bit still after class. In the end, I decided in the end that it would be less stressful. Thus, Wednesday was my last night in Loarre.