Digging Dinosaurs!

there they are stretching triumphantly into the ashore reaches of the sweeping desert sky those those are the book cliffs flowing across the horizon like the waves of a broiling Red Sea they dance and they shimmer beneath the sun's skating gaze but if you're awake early enough to beat the heat if you're bold enough to meet them at sunrise you'll catch them bathing in the sharp light of the early morning only then are you permitted to visually explore this foreign world of stacked peaks and eroding basins of ascending slopes and winding gullies shadowed by great stone walls of menacing steepness all caught up in a rippling vortex of rock and sand but the cliffs that surround me are far humbler than those titans that lie beyond visible from here only through a breach on the north side of this ring of stone through a in the armor of this valley that we call Dolan's Bowl not far from the Colorado border millions have come here to Utah's Grand County to probe the wonders of arches and Canyonlands National Parks but you'll find no tourists here not in this secluded little valley understandable while lovely and peaceful in its own right Dolan's bowl with its low rolling hills of drab grays and greens is hardly so scenic but you must remember that beauty is more than skin deep and it's what's below the surface that makes Dolan's Bowl beautiful there's buried treasure here treasure which if we care to listen can tell a stories of a time when this place and indeed the rest of planet Earth was a different world a time when this land was more hospitable when it was alive and lush when it would have been a far friendlier place to the dinosaurs that once lived here and that is the treasure that I see what precious little of those extinct beings that survives to the present day having persisted across eons to bridge the gap between their time and ours is comprised largely of fossilized bones the tattered remains of the prehistoric world that my childhood was spent reading and dreaming about [Music] say hello to my little friend you'd never know it but it was right here that dinosaurs once lived and died we know this because over the past few years an astonishing number of their fossils have been found right here many of them from this pit a site called gary's island by the end of my first trip here in 2014 it had become clear to me why paleontologists Jim Kirkland and Don tableau have been here nearly every summer since 2005 after spending over a year of each of their lives out here piling up an embarrassment of riches their work has put this locality on the map we left for home at the end of the 2014 summer much the same way that Jim and Dawn had been for years with a truck full of dinosaurs leaving all of us to wonder what else Dolan's Bowl still had to offer what fruits the next summer's work might bring but there was no next season in 2015 budget cuts left us without the means to launch another excursion so when I heard talk of a 2016 season I couldn't wait to return to Dolan's Bowl [Music] even as fossils dinosaurs are stubborn elusive creatures to hunt them you must chase them into the earth we use a jackhammer to break apart the loose sediment at the surface as we don't intend to destroy the very treasure we've traveled so far to find we retire the jackhammer well above where we suspect the fossils to be hiding now the search won't commence amidst the chaotic ruckus of power tools instead after shovelling the splintered rock from our desired surface it will proceed inch by inch amidst the scrapes of ice picks and screwdrivers and the sweeps of brooms and brushes for it's only through keeping your eye to the rock and letting the natural cracks guide your hand that you'll spot bone before impaling it with a pig we do this for hours then days still no signs of bone it seems that this time finding fossils will require more patience than last time again and again we expand the quarry shovel rock away and then lower the walls to expose the bone layer and every time nothing after three days of working and with only a few splinters and shards of bone to show for it we found nothing of substance nothing to tell us anything we didn't already know about the dinosaurs or their world we left the quarry that evening tired and frustrated it seemed that after all it had given us Garry's island had dried up [Music] [Music] the next morning we left dawn and preparator Scot Matson to go and lend a hand at a dig elsewhere in the region to help some students from the University of Utah search for fossil traces of insects from the age of dinosaurs when we returned Don and Scott had abandoned Garry's Island but they moved in just next door the Dolans bulb own bed stretches across a great distance and Gary's Island is only a sliver of that exposure this site called Don's place hasn't been worked since 2008 but it was here in our absence that Scott had found the first intact fossils of the whole trip while they may look like little more than brown splotches in the rock they're season two eyes call it like it is these wrinkled vaguely doughnut-shaped fossils are osteoderms or skin bones similar to the bony structures buried in the ridged backs of crocodilians but the owner of these osteoderms was no crocodile these sheets of bone were once nested in the hide of an ankylosaur it was thanks to osteoderms like these that for many tens of millions of years the ink eyeless ores were the best protected of all dinosaurs throughout their long tenure on planet Earth while remaining loyal to their basic four footed spiky blueprint these stout herbivores would diverge and evolve into a great menagerie of forms each of them living life close to the ground every species wearing their own unique suits of armor distinct arrangements and orientations of osteoderms which across millions of years would stretch and morph into spectacular and extravagant shapes for the better part of the age of dinosaurs and Kaila soars were a common component of their ecosystems as at least one often several varieties of these walking pin cushions once lived side by side since the earliest known in Kyllo sores are found in rocks of the Jurassic period and Dolan's bull hails from the time which followed it a period called the Cretaceous their presence here is no surprise but what sort of an kylus or is this in previous years much more complete and kylus or material has been found here like this characteristically broad pelvis some limb bones as well as several other elements with this smattering of bones we can begin to build a picture however blurry of what this thing is based on the evidence Jim one of the world's few experts on armored dinosaurs considers this creature to be an early member of the group from an especially spiny line of ankylosaurus called the polar cam fiends but it's different from any polar cantine Jim's ever seen though we don't have much of it we have good reason to believe that we have an entirely new species on our hands an animal never seen before a forgotten twig dangling somewhere among the tangled and tattered branches of an ancient and Hardy tree of life but it's not just new ankylosaurs that gives us cause to celebrate because it turns out that the work being carried out here is helping to fill a crucial gap in the history of this tree in the evolution of dinosaurs and the story of life Dolan's Bowl is one little exposure of the rocks that make up the cedar mountain formation a thin winding stretch of badlands that snakes through Eastern Utah like a mighty river of rock every inch of which is Cretaceous the third and final chapter in the Age of dinosaurs the Cretaceous represents about 80 million years of time beginning some 145 million years ago at the close of the Jurassic and marching on until the last of the dinosaurs vanished 66 million years ago so far dinosaur fossils from the very beginning of the Cretaceous have been hard to come by the dinosaurs found in Cedar Mountain quarry's have all come from roughly the last half of the Early Cretaceous placing them somewhat close to the Jurassic Cretaceous transition but not quite the few dinosaur bearing rocks that do date back to the earliest portions of the Cretaceous are known only by a handful of sites in Europe Africa and Asia while the North American record has remained silent but recently dated at somewhere between 132 and 136 million years old it turns out that Dolan's Bowl is the oldest Cretaceous dinosaur site in North America and this explains why just about everything we find here is new as more osteoderms emerge from the quarry so do the traces of the other Cretaceous locals that share this ankylosaurus world and this tooth belonged to what was likely the largest among them this is the crown of a fellow herbivore but a very different sort of animal this tooth was once anchored in the jaw of one of those huge graceful long necks dinosaurs a sauropod but we have a lot more than teeth from this giant and through this area mostly right in here on the edge we found much of the skeleton probably the most complete individual sauropod ever found in the Cretaceous of North America we got good portions of the skull jaws almost every vertebra through the entire vertebral column to the tip of the tail we've got the entire little hind leg from the pelvis all the way down to the toe bones because the animal was what we call mired it has been stuck in the mud and that's what killed it it was trapped this thing might have been trapped here screaming for its friends for days before it finally died we also found the forelimb in the hand buried down under Portugal was sticking out into the wash so it was chopped off just down below the elbow for the forelimb but we got a complete hand as well the only bone we're missing is the upper arm bone and the upper ends of the radius and ulna the elbow area we even did get a complete shoulder blade for this animal so it's it's extraordinarily complete you know and the fact that we got a brain case and number of other skull bones including jaws and teeth make this a remarkably complete animal to study the fossils Jim invited sauropod experts from around the world to examine the skeleton thoroughly which like the inc eyeless or also represents a new species though not nearly as large as those super giants that came before in the Jurassic period by comparing it to related animals this new species stands to teach us a great deal about the evolution of these animals through time and across continents if the in Kyllo sores were the porcupines the sauropods the giraffes then the iguanodons with a wildebeest of the early cretaceous found more commonly than any other sort of dinosaur in these beds once upon a time these charming thumb spiked herbivores would have filled Mesozoic landscapes trimming foliage and reworking the Earth's surface in 2010 Jim and his colleagues studied and named several Iguanodon skeletons they found at younger sites elsewhere in the Cedar Mountain Formation among those so far named Jim suspects that the Dolans ball animals are most similar to iguana Colossus a creature which as its name suggests was an imposing Beast and like the new ankylosaur and the new sauropod helps to fill in a pivotal gap in the evolution of its own group whether or not the Dolans bowl specimens are iguana Colossus or from one of its as-yet-unnamed relatives remains to be seen a question that will demand close anatomical scrutiny to answer but what we do know is that there were at least two varieties of thumb spiked herbivores living here as some of the new Iguanodon material differs substantially from anything seen before adding yet another new species to the list with such a diverse plant hungry cast as this it's worth asking what could have possibly sustained all of these animals after all many of them wait as much as rhinos or elephants there must have been sufficient greenery to bring them here but it turns out that just a few steps from the quarry there are fossils that can help provide an answer in a rather vivid way and then this thing is nice because you can see that it's completely coalesce down roots so it's just like a mat of these fern roots you can see them splitting and the fibrous structure when these things were growing near like around this site in this marshy environment and probably annually or continuously perhaps they would send up new fronds would come up out of the roots and the new front would build up and provide fodder from some of these animals I'm assuming somebody in this environment ate those ferns perhaps it was the pull of camp beans perhaps it was the sauropods perhaps the iguanodons but I have a feeling they were going more for the conifers based on what we know about copra lights so are these a good indicator of heavy equipment that it was wet dead to some degree one of the things you can look at you know we see root traces in the fossil record all the time and they're usually vertical the vertical they're looking for water see these things are horizontal so they're show certainly showing in terms of habitat but this is a wet habitat because the ferns are going out laterally you know they're not having to go down for water and they don't seem to have a huge effect on the bone like we see with vertical roots water plants tend to absorb their minerals and nutrients phosphorus etc out of the water column and on land they go down they find bone and destroy it but not so much the case when that's why bones in water tend to preserve better than bones preserved in soils sometimes the teeth of crocodiles turn up an intriguing thing to come across in a place that's a desert today but lining the back of this tooth fragment are a row of tiny ridges serait shion's not unlike the ones you'd find on a steak knife in truth they were used for much the same purpose this tooth comes from a small carnivorous dinosaur perhaps from the only species from Dolan's bowl that carries an official scientific name in 2005 Donne collected a small partial skeleton including parts of a pelvis as well as an assortment of small vertebrae it proved to be of a theropod one of the meat-eating dinosaurs more specifically this little carnivore belongs to the dromaeosaurus a a clan of theropods more commonly known as the raptors dromaeosaurs were light agile feathered hunters mostly very small animals in 2012 Don Jim and colleagues named this new addition to the dromaeosaurus vasya the native ute tribes word for coyote another theropod tooth was spotted soon after but the blade embedded in this rock is far too large to belong to yurga vasya or any Raptor similar teeth often much larger have been found here over the years but as of yet there's very little in the way of bones to complement them there's no skeletons to illuminate their identity what these teeth do tell us though through their familiar shape and monstrous size is that this was some sort of karna sore the theropod clan that includes the mighty Allosaurus which had already been extinct for millions of years by this time nameless and elusive finds like this one are a haunting reminder that immense multi-ton predators once stalked this land there we have it having found organisms at several levels of this extinct food web we can flesh out this lost ecosystem from the Sun that brought life to their world to the prehistoric plants that once harnessed its energy the herbivores that fed upon them and the carnivores that ate them with this extinct environment vividly revived in our minds the absence of any giant dinosaurs overshadows the more meager presence of what does live here wandering bands of coyotes passed through here revealing themselves only through the footprints they leave for us peppered in soft sand after long moonlit nights when their calls and cries echo through the valleys crisp air to pierce the thin fabric of our tents and invade our ears judging solely on the smaller members of this ecological community though it might seem as though the dinosaurs were still roaming this valley the local pack rats prairie dogs and rabbits are all timid shy creatures just as skittish as their ancestors must have been back in the Cretaceous when they were confined to the underbrush by their fear of hungry theropods but in the truest sense possible this still goes on a fact not fully realized until the swooping shadows of great raptorial predators are caught wisping across the scorching rock on the prowl for their furball prey dinosaurs still roam this valley only now they do so in the feathered guise of keen eyed hawks and eagles dinosaur fossils are brittle and they'd sooner crumble and leave the clutches of their surrounding rock so we must be patient with them after sifting through rock all day and we finally do see a bone which hasn't seen the light since it was first buried here our first reaction is to drizzle a few drops of a liquid hardener a kind of glue to prevent further damage but that's not enough once enough area around the fossil has been exposed to gain an idea of its shape and dimension or in this case after we'd uncovered several osteoderms right beside each other we have to secure it we do this by putting it in what we call a jacket we apply a thin layer of wet paper towel over the bones and then cover the block that we intend to remove with strips of burlap that we soaked in plaster once the plaster hardens we flip the block over to do the other side only then can we rest assured knowing that the bones are safe [Music] [Music] with the heat now burning furiously into August it seemed like we were never gonna catch a break but August is monsoon season when the Summer Sun is betrayed by the almost nightly arrival of rumbling thunderstorms which echo like some distant battle we would inevitably receive the full force of these travelling storms and though nobody wants to work in a flooded mud filled quarry the arrival of thick cloud cover was a welcome change [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] with the Sun and torpor it seemed like the right time to try our luck and comb the valley floor for fossils losing to the surface but it takes a trained eye to notice that we're walking on a thin carpet of bone fragments so much stuff geez bone bone bone it's like these are in kylus or osteoderms much smaller versions of what we find in the quarry piece of a tooth it's very smooth man this is incredible they just litter the ground everywhere big ones complete one see look at this this is oh this is a whole one all of these little fossils treasures as they are are scientifically speaking worth little more than souvenirs in paleontology context is everything fossils found floating on the surface are divorced from their original position they don't lead to any skeletons and they're typically too weathered to preserve any meaningful information there only tastes of what this place has to offer so we put them back where we found them back where they belong back at the quarry we begin the process of recording the location and position of each bone so we can piece together a map of the quarry which will undoubtedly yield important clues about the environment the bones were deposited in how many individuals might be buried here and what was going on during and after the animal's deaths osteoderms are nice but what we wanted to find more than anything was a skull from our new ankylosaur skulls contain an enormous amount of infer nation and if we could put a face to this new species we stand to learn a lot more about it than we ever could from a few bones and a jumble of osteoderms while dinosaur skulls tend to be hard to come by as they're often comprised of thin and fragile parts we stand a better chance with our ankylosaur because much like the animals that once owned them and Kaila sore skulls are tough day after day we return to the quarry where we'll shovel and jackhammer away picking and sweeping splitting shifting and dumping tons of rock all of us potentially a moment away from finding something beautiful glimmers of fossil bone yet to have the pleasure of sharing their secrets with any human on some days we find next to nothing others we find so much that at times it may seem that there's nowhere you can place a knee or elbow without crushing precious bone some days the quarry will be crowded with volunteers both students and scientists alike all itching for a find to write home about on other days there as few as two or three of us people come people go days pass the Sun for the most part stays at the end of one of these days after an afternoon spent working in the quarry after an evening at camp spent resting and talking over dinner alone in my tent while thinking about this place I'm overcome with a feeling that I can only describe as a state of transience after all this secluded little Valley in eastern Utah has a lot of stories to tell whether it be the story of those who came here in the 50s to mine for uranium whose legacy is today bared out by the names of nearby road signs or by geologic units that read poison strip or yellow cat or the story of my fellow human being who before the Dust Bowl had its chance to turn this place from grassland to wasteland sat down in this very spot to each their initials into this slab of rock nearly a century ago or the story of those Wanderers who centuries or perhaps millennia before deemed the raw materials found here as suitable for fashioning the arrowheads that they trusted to hunt with that they depended on to feed themselves and each other or the story of those ancient book cliffs who beckon from an infinitely more remote time and whose looming specter was also once gazed upon from here by those very same native people as brilliant as they must have been to live off the earth and read the Stars what they didn't know is that those distant rocky fortresses which stand just as proudly here as they do anywhere along their 200-mile spine that arches from here to Colorado is that they are merely the remnants of a vast prehistoric see that once carved its way through the heart of North America some 90 million years ago as inseparable from the fabric of this landscape as the sky above us is and yes permanent and unshakable as those cliffs may seem they themselves represent the most spectacular of change but it takes a tremendous leap back in time infinitely long before the first human was ever to lay eyes on those cliffs before the cliffs themselves had even risen to prominence over this land and even before the extinguished sea that they represent last crashed against the shores of Mesozoic Utah but you could see the animals we find in the quarry walk the earth as living beings the sun that shined down upon their backs at the dawn of the cretaceous would have been very similar to the one that hangs above us today only theirs was a hundred and thirty million years younger back then when the first glimmers of light would arrive to pierce through this landscape a more hospitable place would be revealed a place that was alive and lush rich enough to sustain the locals for the most part it was probably a calm peaceful place to be when ankylosaurs ambled along with their stout bodies hugging the ground their faces buried in their leafy food and their plates of armor lit up in the morning light when massive iguanodons plotted alongside them walking from tree to tree on two feet and even when the marsh was graced by the great swooping necks of elegant sauropods that came here to feed in this cretaceous garden occasionally lowering their small heads to lap up gulps from its virgin springs but occasionally without warning and all at once it would seem as though the entire earth would erupt in a chaotic chorus of snapping branches and rustling bushes fleeing dinosaurs signaled the arrival of a theropod great and powerful beings of teeth and muscle [Music] [Music] our time here was running out soon we'd have to pack it all in despite the slow start this place held true to its reputation as we were still finding fossils right up until the end though a complete and Kaila sore skull remained elusive we'd found much of the armour of this new dinosaur as well as several other bones some of iguanodons some which we weren't quite sure about with every specimen either bagged or firmly cocooned in the embrace of a plaster jacket our dinosaurs were ready for the journey to their new home where they'll be reunited with some of the other treasures of Dolan's Bowl only after the specimens arrived at the lab after they're cleaned and prepared will the fruits of this summer's labor be fully appreciated but that could take years the act of carefully removing each of the fossils from the rock they still cling to of gluing and repairing breaks and ensuring that they'll still be around to study long after we're all gone is a long and tedious process and there's already a long waiting list if Jim and Dawn never went back into the field again there would still be a lifetime of work waiting for them back at the lab the story is usually the same for paleontologists there's so much out there so much to find but there's only so much you can carry there's so much to conserve but so little time for it all so much to learn but so few people who can really make things happen Jim and Dawn are guys who make things happen and I'm just glad I can help nevertheless I'm fully aware of just how susceptible our minds are to romanticizing past experiences still even as I write these words from the field I predict that months from now when I'll find myself sitting in the classroom or stuck in traffic on a ride to Salt Lake City that I'll recall my days in the desert with a smile my mind will return to Dolan's Bowl only then it'll replace the feeling that I gulped from my water bottle torched by the Sun would bring as its contents burned their way down my throat with the moments of relief that I felt when the clouds would roll by to bar the Sun from stinging my face I'll forget the biting pests for the thrill of discovery the hard work in the hot Sun for the calm that followed rain storms over the sweat and dust I'll reminisce about the stories shared among fits of laughter at camp or nights spent counting shooting stars tomorrow morning we'll finish packing up and start the long drive home we'll leave dueling's Bowl for our family and friends and return to our normal lives but that's not until tomorrow as for tonight I'll be back at camp puzzling over those reptilian beasties with my friends and then later on I'll return to my tent for the last time this year where I'll spend the night dreaming about the dinosaurs that once lived here whose bones patiently sit through one last starry night in the darkness well back in the day when monsters roam the earth and everything was alive and nothing would hurt oh yeah nothing back in the day but everything has changed now there's nothing but pain will grow well no sucks but we all gotta die and there's our luck [Music] well it's gotta happen sometime well I know that you're scared but you will ain't broke now who are going to a city of gold [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Living Past

Views: 13,154

Rating: 4.9028697 out of 5

Keywords: Dinosaurs, fossils, fossil, paleontology, palaeontology, paleontologists, palaeontologists, dinosaur documentary, dinosaur digging documentary, paleontology documentary, Ethan Cowgill, The Living Past, Evolution, Ankylosaurs, Iguanodont, Sauropod, A Fossilized Hunt?, The Oldest Whales?, Dwarf Elephant Odyssey?, Utah dinosaurs, Utah Geological Survey, Yurgovuchia, Polacanthinae, Iguanacolossus, Doelling's Bowl

Id: v6keGp1Dd28

Length: 35min 33sec (2133 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/MornCoffeeEvnWhisky]

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