4 days and 3 Nights in Buluk

Welcome to the Buluk Blog of the TBI Origins Field School: Spring 2025. I’m your author, Katie, a senior at Stony Brook University majoring in Anthropology. In this blog, I am going to take you through our field trip to Buluk, a fossil locality approximately 4 hours east of the TBI Ileret campus. We traveled to Buluk as part of our Vertebrate Paleontology module with Professor Ellen Miller. After spending the first week of the module learning how to identify different bones and their taxonomic orders, we were more than prepared to put our new skills to work.

Early in the morning on March 3rd, the TBI Spring Origins field school and members of the TBI staff squeezed into the lorry to begin our four-hour journey to set up camp in Buluk. Once we arrived, the whole team worked together to put up our shades, one area for eating and one for food preparation. With everyone working together, we were able to set up our entire communal space in about an hour. Many hands make quick work of a task like this. Then, we all assembled our tents before heading out to “Dead Elephant Valley” for an afternoon of prospecting.

At “Dead Elephant Valley”, with the help of Martin Kirinya (called Ronaldo on the football pitch, according to Georgia) and Ellen, I catalogued the first of many fossils collected during the trip. I had found a proboscidean (or ancient elephant) tooth. We prospected for about an hour, flagging noteworthy surface finds. Everyone found at least one fossil, and we marked so many promising spots to return to later. Georgia flagged the bones of a rhino, and Nina flagged a carnivore tooth that we didn’t have time to catalog on our first visit, ensuring our return before our trip ended. Additionally, we knew we wouldn’t have all the materials needed to retrieve every fossil, but Sankale and Mary discovered what appeared to be an entire elephant skeleton eroding out of a hillside. With limited time and other sites to see before sunset, we left our flags in their places and planned to return to the site in the coming days.

On our way back to camp, we stopped at a massive fossilized tree, which now has a modern sapling growing from the center. We took in the views offered at the site and reflected on Buluk’s significance in expanding our knowledge of vertebrate paleontology throughout the Miocene. Then, it was time to head back to camp for dinner and some much-needed rest before a full day of prospecting. Back at camp, the group decompressed. Some of us sat around the table sharing stories, while others explored the immediate landscape, admiring the scattered rocks and the brilliant sunset.

In the morning, we woke up bright and early and tried to head to the “Far Locality” by 7 am to get ahead of the sun and the heat. We spent the whole morning surveying the site and found a few fossils, though it was not the most fossiliferous locality of our trip. Grace found a tragulid metapodial and Georgia found a selenodont upper molar. Two primate teeth were found, one by Sankale, who says that that was his favorite find of the whole trip, and one by Ellen.

At lunchtime, we headed back to camp for some food and down-time before heading to “Aaron’s Locality” for the afternoon.

At “Aarons Locality”, Georgia found a hyrax molar, and I found a small tragulid astragulus within a few meters of each other.

On our final day in Buluk, we spent the morning going to “The Valley of the Moon,” which is the highest stratigraphic locality in Buluk. Jazzy’s keen eye spotted a tiny tragulid carpal bone. In the afternoon, we returned to “Dead Elephant Valley” to catalogue our finds from the first day. While there, Andrew found his favorite personal discovery, a rhino maxilla. Aleks uncovered several dental fragments that she believed fit together and planned to reassemble them back at the lab. Meanwhile, Kevin cataloged a possible giraffe metacarpal.

By the end of the trip, we had collected 55 different fossils for further assessment back at the lab in Ileret.

On March 6th, we woke up early to break down camp. We packed up our tents, shade structures, and any other gear before loading everything into one lorry. The team packed into the second lorry, marking the end of an unforgettable field experience as we made our way back to TBI.

This trip to Buluk was an incredible opportunity to apply what we had learned in class, hone our fossil identification skills, and experience firsthand the thrill of discovery. As we returned to Ileret, we carried with us not just fossils, but also a deeper appreciation for the rich paleontological history of this region.