Dinosaur Bones

Dinosaur Bones

We’ve been studying fossils since the 1970s – over 50 years! if my math is correct. Our research has spanned the entire globe and the complete fossil record. We get excited by everything paleontologic – be it recent Holocene mammals or deep Precambrian microbes. To us some of the most astonishing fossils are microscopic; truly ancient bacteria over two billion years old. We also get giddy over relatively recent (12,000 years) giants of the Ice Age: mammoths, mastodonts, and saber-toothed tigers. In fact, we helped excavate and prepare the largest, most complete Woolly Mammoth ever found in North America – the Hebior Mammoth from Kenosha, Wisconsin (now at the Milwaukee Public Museum). We used that specimen as a centerpiece for a traveling exhibition we created – “Elephants! 50 Million Years of Evolution” – which told the complete story of elephant evolution. It toured the US for over 12 years. So, as you see, we’ve traveled through time and space and excavated a huge amount of fossils in a never ending adventure learning quest.

Then Came the Dinosaurs!

My dad used to say “The inevitable will occur…” And so it did in 1989 when Hal and I made the inevitable decision to challenge ourselves and strike out in search of dinosaurs. We spent months crisscrossing badlands in the West, eventually ending up at an area of high desert in east-central Wyoming, north of Lance Creek. What we discovered there was incredible. We eventually mapped 6 separate fossil sites within a mile radius of our camp. Half of them were rich “bone beds” with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of skeletons scattered and mixed together in the sediments. For over 10 years we excavated bones – mostly hadrosaurs (Edmontosaurus) – at our Wyoming Dinosaur Sites. Most of them ended up at the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM) and other educational institutions around the world. To get a feel for our digging at this site, see my story “Site 89A” in the Jon’s Log section of our website. The ranch where we excavated the dinosaurs was owned and run by Jack, the son of the couple who founded the ranch. Jack was a boisterous and raucous cowboy who loved to ride around the washes and hoodoos on his ATV with his dog Mary Jane in his lap. The two were inseparable. At the end of a long, sweaty day it was refreshing to see Jack come zooming over the hill to see what we’d unearthed that day. Sadly Jack passed away in the 2000s, about the same time our dinosaur digs were wrapping up.

How They Formed

The remote section of Jack’s ranch where our sites were located was once a low floodplain in the Late Cretaceous, about 68 million years ago. Braided streams and rivers coursed across the landscape which was rich with plants and animals. On occasion, herds of Edmontosaurus dinosaurs would cross the rivers in much the same way as wildebeest cross the Mara River in East Africa today. And just the same, many individuals would die in the attempt. Their bodies washed downstream, their bones piling up on the river bottom and at bends in the channel. A quick accumulation of sand and clay sediments buried these spots and insured the protection of the fossils. Being the sediments were very fine, it helped preserve all the details of the bone surface. The preservation at these sites is second to none! The bones we offering here are specimens that the SMM decided they did not need as they were lesser duplicates of bones they already had.