Dinosaur Explorations
The Closest We’ll Get to Jurassic Park
A dusty scientist in full Indiana Jones apparel toiling in the hot desert sun suddenly stands up, waving her brush and yelling, “I’ve got it! Over here. It’s another bone!” As a child, the romantic lure of paleontology sung to my young soul; my singular aspiration in life was to become a successful paleontologist who travelled to exotic locales, discovering and naming new dinosaur species. Older now, my career aspirations have changed, but paleontology still holds a special place in my heart. So, when I found out that we were going to Dinosaur National Monument on IFP, my heart skipped a beat. Dinosaurs!! That single word transported me back to my seven year old self and I started feeling the familiar butterflies of anticipation, just like on Christmas morning. I knew that Utah was a hotspot for awesome fossils and eagerly anticipating the collection at the Visitors Center.
The Visitors Center looked like a humble building from the outside, but just inside the door I felt a wave of excitement and awe wash over me as I saw the treasures inside. One whole wall of the visitors center consisted of carefully excavated, randomly scattered leg and tail bones, skulls, and vertebrae, some of which WE COULD TOUCH (!!!), embedded into a massive stone wall. The stone, I learned, was part of the variegated, sandstone and conglomerate mix of the Morrison Formation, which was deposited in a river environment.
Many of the fossils on display, like the ferocious Allosaurus looming over me, came from one specific, concentrated area of the Morrison called the Carnegie Quarry. Although the quarry was formed from a single river channel, it is a premier dinosaur fossil area because when floodwaters receded, the river slowed and began to deposit bones. These bones piled up and were covered in sand and mud over time, creating a dino “logjam.” Once the Rockies were uplifted, erosion allowed these fossils to be exposed to the surface again, giving modern man a glimpse into the Jurassic.
Riding on my wave of excitement from seeing bony relics of the past, I was delighted to scour the nooks and crannies of the Morrison Formation with my fellow IFP students the next day. We were not fossil-hunting, though I couldn’t help harbor in a secret hope that we would find one. Instead, we were completing a geology mapping assignment; our goal was to plot the boundaries between different formations on a topographic map and to then figure out the story behind how the formations were deposited based on our observations.
Sounds straight-forward right? Wrong! The task was incredibly frustrating at first. Reading the stratigraphic map, much less drawing boundary lines, seemed to be near impossible. Each pre-drawn line was supposed to indicate a standard change in elevation, but to me the lines just looked like random squiggles. I struggled to picture how the map could be translated into the topography around me. Taking strike and dip measurements to determine the orientation of each geologic feature was interminable.
However, once we began to master these skills, the project became more like an adventurous quest. We scrambled up sandstone cliff faces to reach the best vantage point to view the striped landscape, plotted the target formations on our map, and strategized the easiest way to get to the next high point. While we didn’t stumble upon any new dinosaur fossils, our time adventuring through the cliff-and-valley-riddled desert landscape of the Morrison Formation satisfied my dream of being an intrepid scientist explorer.
