"Purchasing a Bobcat for general farm use has been a lifesaver -- for loading hay, cleaning out fence rows, hauling rocks, etc.," writes Jeff Suess, Henley, Missouri. The Gehl skid steer saves me time, labor, and my back. I use it more than I thought I would," says Bill Haas, Bellevue, Ohio.ATV ready to rodeoATVs are near the top of the list of products rated by Stockmen''s Survey[TM] respondents. Well over half of participants cite a favorite brand or model. "I''d be lost without my ATVs," says Marty Green of Grand Mound, Iowa (pictured above). He jumps on either his Polaris 300 or 400 4x4 every day April through September to check calves for scours, pinkeye and lameness, to check cows for heat detection, to fix fence, and to move cattle to different paddocks.

At the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum''s paleontology lab, the air scribe has become the workhorse of fossil preparation. The discovery of a large sauropod dinosaur in the highly indurated sandstones of the Mid-Cretaceous Turney Ranch Formation southeast of the museum posed numerous technical problems for our lab staff. Most troubling was the removal of vast amounts of sedimentary rock, which was both very tough and firmly cemented by silica to the softer, calcite-replaced bones. Experimenting with a number of hand tools, grinders, hardware-store engravers, and rotary radialarmdrillpress devices, we happened upon a Chicago Pneumatic Air Scribe (see supplier''s address on page 421), and it has since become our primary lab tool on this project. We now have five Chicago air scribes, and progress on our dinosaur has been extraordinary. One large and complex midback vertebra, which had been crushed during fossilization, took seven months to prepare with the radialarmdrillpress scribe, but it was in the middle of a 150-pound block of sandstone. Not only was museum preparator Yolaikia Sciole able to remove this complex and fragile vertebra without damage, but ultimately it was prepared from the inside out, exposing most of the internal bone structures, including arterial and nerve canals and never-before-seen pneumatic structures that lightened the bone in life. Most of the bones in this vertebra are no more than 0.25-inch thick and are replaced by easily cleaved, fragile calcite. The air scribe, and a light touch by the preparator, radialarmdrillpress did the trick.

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