Dinosaur Dig - July 2002
Garden Park, Colorado

Tons of work, jack hammering hard stone, hammer and chiseling when things got too close to the fossil bone for the jack hammer.  100 degrees on a south facing slope in the sun, we baked.  I never drank so much Gater Aid in my life!

We started off with a small crew, just six of us.  All told we had 19 different people come to the site, including the well known paleo-artist John Gurche and the museum's head dino scientist Ken Carpenter.  We worked from Saturday July 13 to Saturday July 20 at a site that had been initially discovered and worked in 1992.  Work had stopped there when other significant discoveries were made in Garden Park and Utah.

We had a "map" of where to find top-jacketed and well reburied bones.  In our search for these buried treasures, we discovered new bones.  Turns out this site is a "bone bed", a place that had been a sandbar in a river where bones had piled up and fossilized.  We couldn't trench around a bone without hitting another, or at least some other smaller pieces of bone.  

This was my first dinosaur dig since completing my paleontology certification in 1996.  The rest of the crew were well seasoned and I learned so much.  Luckily my exercise regimen helped me contribute at least some brute force to the effort.  I think my enthusiasm was also appreciated.  I mean, what could be more fun than to actually be digging up dinosaurs!  

The bones we found (we took out about 7 jackets) are from the oldest part of the famous dinosaur bone producing Morrison Formation.  They could be from a previously unknown type of sauropod (long neck dino) from the early Jurassic (~150 million years ago).  We had to leave some bones in the ground.  I'm sure more digging would produce more bones.  Who knows, if these turn out to be significant, we may go back and do this all over again - ugh.