In the evenings, some of the AP3 team camping on Vega Island have been making drawings meant to summarize the day’s activities in a fun and often whimsical way. Over the next few blogs, we will post these visual diaries along with some notes. Below is the first installment featuring the art of APE team member Abby West.

Feb 26: This is an interpretive map of Vega Island, as seen from the west, marked with some of the localities we have discovered and the names we gave them, as well as some of the interesting fossils found there.

Feb 27: This is a more emotional piece, featuring two creatures entwined in a mid-air battle. The combatants are Caped Lamb (a metaphor for Cape Lamb, the location of our camp) and a hapless plesiosaur (a metaphor for the 3 or 4 plesiosaur partial skeletons we have so far uncovered). Plesiosaurs are long-necked, extinct marine reptile skuas. On Caped Lamb’s cape is a typical Vega Island scene, with a carpet of moss on the valley floor between dusty brown bluffs and ever-watchful skuas circling overhead. The lower quarter of this picture portrays a more serene moment of the day, when the Vega team dined al fresco: we lined up a single row of chairs facing the ocean and watched a magnificent sunset while eating chicken pad thai.