Fossils and Fun
We awoke this morning to a strange sound, and discovered this gnarly 4×4 cruising by our camp site.
We found that our camp mascot was eagerly awaiting our attention – – –
But we turned our backs and scooted up the hill to the dinosaur quarry instead. This place is quite unique, kind of like the La Brea tar pits in LA, but these were all fossilized by a long sequence of river confluences and flooding. Also, after fossilization, the strata were turned on end by an uplift. The “beds” of fossils are near-vertical. A vast section of the original find has been preserved inside a building, for all to see and appreciate, and hopefully to last a longer time than would result by weather exposure.
The Quarry has an astonishing assortment of visible fossils like this huge leg bone from a sauropod – –
Plus some excellent re-constructions, including this truly scary-sized allosaurus – – generally acknowledged as the lion of its day in terms of predatory skill, speed, and aggressiveness.
Here’s a closer example of the stuff “on the wall” of the Quarry. It’s a portion of the spine of a sauropod, with one vertebra exposed at the right end. The piece’s round section shown here is the diameter of a dinner plate. Sauropods were the giant plant-eaters of the era, and weighed in at more than 30 tons.
We left the Quarry more educated and in deep awe of the magnitude of this 1909 discovery. It’s been an international paleontology celebration since then.
As we take our first exploratory trip through the Monument, we discover a burgeoning prairie dog population anywhere it’s flat enough to support a town full of their low burrows. They are so numerous, so fearless, and perhaps so stupid, that the local roadkill is simply not to be believed. The roads are littered with ex-prairie-dogs. Since they are diurnal, none are killed at night. They simplyl dart out here and there, oblivious to the danger of the vehicles. There are some stretches of highway where, if you drive 200 yards in a straight line, you will run over 3 or 4 previously-squashed carcasses.
Undeterred (and hoping the goo wasn’t piling up in Ralph’s tire treads), launched into the back country. True to character, the little boogers ran in front of us at every turn or puff of wind. Ralph and I were powerless to avoid them, and several went directly underneath us before we could brake or swerve. But we did get lucky. In fact, I’m happy to say that WE didn’t hit any prairie dogs the entire day.
We drove (nervously but resolutely) across the flats and into the canyons above the Green River, finding outstanding scenery and a plentiful assortment of petroglyphs.
At the end of the road, we found a broad “delta” kind of an area, with the Green sort of meandering for a couple of miles. In the distance, you can see the cleft in the long bluff; this is the “split” in Split Mountain, a geographical wonder where the river actually came to wear its way through a mountain range instead of diverting around it.
Here’s a closer shot of the split. If you don’t see a car, house, fence, or object anywhere in either of these pictures, that’s because there isn’t anything there. It’s quite remote.
After a long, dusty hike full of foxtails (it was 95F), Karin got up close and personal with a fossilized sand dune. Dunes are not fossilized in the same fashion as bones (where minerals replace bone). Instead, they are covered up, soaked in minerals and compressed until they solidify into sandstone. The final shape, texture, and appearance are quite bizarre, looking pillow-ey in one place and like weathered wood grain somewhere else.
After a long, gorgeous (but hot) day, we arrived back at our camp entrance road. Looking down, we found it once again nearly empty, waiting for the weekend’s travelers. We settled in, cooled off, and got ready for our next day.
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