Chasing the cretaceous

Hunting for dinosaur fossils in the Hell Creek Formation

“It’s Cretaceous crime scene work: We have a body — how did it get here?”

Kelsie Abrams, Fossil Lab Manager for the UW’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, left her climate-controlled lab to wield jackhammers and shovels on a dusty hillside of the Hell Creek Formation in remote eastern Montana, possibly the best place in the world to find fossils from the Late Cretaceous.

In this short film, follow Abrams and the dig team from the field to the lab, as they unravel mysteries from the end of the age of dinosaurs.

Kelsie Abrams polaroid

Originally published February 2022