Dinosaur National Monument
We head over to Dinosaur National Monument. We are are on the Utah side of this rather large park, on the side where there is a dinosaur quarry. From Wikipedia-- "The Dinosaur wall located within the Dinosaur Quarry building in the park consists of a steeply tilted (67° from the horizontal) rock layer which contains hundreds of dinosaur fossils. The enclosing rock has been chipped away to reveal the fossil bones intact for public viewing. The rock layer enclosing the fossils is a sandstone and conglomerate bed of alluvial or river bed origin known as the Morrison Formation from the Jurassic Period some 150 million years old. The dinosaurs and other ancient animals were washed into the area and buried presumably during flooding events.The rock layers were later uplifted and tilted to their present angle by the mountain building forces that formed the Uintas. The relentless forces of erosion exposed the layers at the surface to be found by paleontologists.
"The dinosaur fossil beds were discovered in 1909 by Earl Douglass, a paleontologist working and collecting for the Carnegie Museum. He excavated thousands of fossils and shipped them back to the museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for study and display."
There haven't been any fossils removed from this quarry since the 80's or early 90's because they pretty much just kept finding the same things--allosaurs, clams, and such. The wall of the quarry where work was performed, now part of the visitor's center, has been kept the way it was when the research stopped for visitors to see. DNM has been the world's richest site for complete skeletons of dinosaurs. They even found a rare skeleton of a baby stegosaurus which they presumed to be only a few years old at its time of death. In other sections of DNM, there is archeology still going on with new finds including some intact skulls, one of the least found parts of dinosaurs.
Eric asked one of the rangers what they make of the recent soft tissue finds by Mary Schweitzer and colleagues in NC (found in Montana fossils), and he pretty much shook his head saying he didn't know what to make of it. There is a notebook to thumb through with lots of articles in plastic sheet protectors related to recent paleontology, and the Mary Scweitzer stuff is in there. I overheard a conversation between a gentleman and a ranger that also highlighted the pessimism of the non-Christian/non-creationist worldview. They were disscussing a chart showing the relative duration of different life forms on the earth--bacteria--so many million years on earth, fish--so many million, dinosaurs--so many million, mammals--so many million, and man--so many thousand years. Both the park visitor and the ranger were in agreement that man's time on earth is certainly limited by his ecologically suicidal behavior, and both were certain that some other life form will inherit the earth in the ages after man is gone.
Unfortunately for the little kids, there are no T-rexes here, but Amos, Ward, & John got to participate in a ranger-led kids program where they put together a dinosaur bone wooden puzzle. John attached his tail piece to the question mark representing missing fossil pieces. Now he thinks dinosaurs have question marks in them!
We then went over to the Josie Bennett cabin, home place of a real-life modern pioneer. In the 1920s when Josie was 39 and at the end of her 4th marriage, she decided she needed a new start in life. She found what she thought was some good land here for cattle ranching. She built her cabin with the help of her son and grandson, but mostly by herself and lived here for over 40 years. She had some battles over water rights, but fortunately for her, she had two or three springs on the property which she dammed to build ponds. There were two canyons on the property, the rock walls of which served as natural cattle fences. She managed to have up to 200 head of cattle on the place at one time. She was quite a colorful character, & in spite of the fact she never had electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing, managed to lead a comfortable life until she broke her hip falling on the ice in 1963. She died in 1964. We picnicked beside her cabin after letting the kids have a good scramble up the rocks of one of the canyons.
We made pictures of petroglyphs on the way back to the camper. We all needed showers and the campground had a scary advertisement on their wall--"showers $4 a person per day." Hmmm...doing the math would be $28 extra for all of us. How stinky were we, really? Well...how firm is $4? We approached the lady in the host camper since the office was closed & told her we had five children & were needing showers. We hadn't gotten too far in our efforts to dicker when she said, how about $10 for all of you? Okay, efforts to dicker just saved us $18 dollars vs. just putting the money in an envelope as requested.