When you are coring the seafloor, the first piece of the core that the scientists get their hands on is from the core catcher. The core catcher is the little bit at the end of the tube full of sediment that lets stuff in, but not back out. The paleontologists usually get it first, so they can use the microfossils and nannofossils to tell us how old the sediment is. Here are two of our paleontologists with a bowl of mud to start their day off right.
