We liked Grand Junction and loved the Colorado National Monument we
visited the day before. Both places were just amazing and we were glad
we left the beaten path and stopped on a side to see something we missed
before. And we planned to do the same the next day.
Next morning, we left I-70 and took Highway 139 to Dinosaur. The
day started gray and gloomy but we had no complaints and drove between
orchards and endless valleys.
We climbed the summits and drove through the clouds. We enjoyed dim and wet landscapes and winding mountain roads. We were ready to meet Dinosaur, but first we met a lot of antelopes and deer ;)
Actually we didn't stop in Dinosaur - the town of 340 residents. We
stopped at the visitor center to have some coffee (and the visitor
center is great - new and spacious with tons of information about all
activities everywhere in Colorado) and turned towards Vernon, where we stopped only to take a picture of the Pink Dinosaur - a rare and disappearing creature.
We passed Vernon without stopping and continued towards Flaming
Gorge (and I'll show you this amazing place tomorrow) but returned back
before dark to meet the dinosaur. This time not the town but real creatures ;)
Dinosaur National Monument is an absolutely amazing place to visit.
The Western entry brings you to the museum where your mind would be
blown off...
The quarry site at what is now Dinosaur National Monument
was discovered
in 1909 by Earl Douglass, a paleontologist from the Carnegie Museum in
Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. Douglass, whose specialty was fossil mammals, had been
working
in the Uinta Basin of northeastern Utah since 1907, collecting 40-
million-year-old
mammal fossils from the Eocene Uinta Formation. In hopes of finding
dinosaur
skeletons for display at the Carnegie Museum, Douglass was sent north by
museum director Dr. W.J. Holland to the flanks of the Uinta Mountains,
where
uplift had exposed rocks from the age of dinosaurs. Among the layers of
rocks exposed here is a rock unit or formation known as the Morrison
Formation originated approximately 150 million years ago as
floodplain deposits. It was widespread, covering the area that is now
Colorado,
Wyoming, eastern Utah, northern New Mexico, parts of Montana and South
Dakota,
and the panhandle of Oklahoma. These sediments were deposited under
conditions
favorable for the burial and preservation of skeletal remains. Most of
the
Jurassic-age dinosaurs known from North America come from the Morrison
Formation.
This rock unit is named after Morrison, Colorado, a small town west of
Denver
where the first major discovery of Morrison dinosaurs was made in 1877.
Douglass conducted excavations at the site, known as the Carnegie Quarry,
for about the next fifteen years. Most of these collections were made for
the Carnegie Museum, but the Smithsonian Institution and the University
of Utah also received material from the site. Dynamite was often needed
to blast through the overlying rock layers, and over 350 tons of fossil
material was shipped back to the Carnegie Museum.
Millions years ago it was a river bed where the dinosaurs lived, died or
were killed. Sand from the river bed covered the remains and they stayed in layers
for many millions years. Sand was transformed to sandstone
and limestone and at some point had erupted when the earth crust moved and crashed
millions years ago. Once that was a flat river's bed and now it's almost a vertical wall open to people's eyes.
In 1926 they
stopped excavation and built a pavilion to preserve the exposed bones and provide better visitor's experience. Now here you can find the wall with about 1500 bones exposed. These bones
belong to over a hundred different species! Also you can find
a complete dinosaur skeleton and two casts of complete skeletons
displaying how they
were discovered. Today it is an amazing place where everybody can find
something exciting and the adults are turning into kids again and
discovering the history preserved in stone...
By the way, some bones are left within the reach of the visitors and you
can touch it to feel hundreds of millions of years on your
fingertips...
Click links below to explore the previous day of our trip:
Pictures were taken on May 24, 2015.
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