Part 5

STARTING THE QUARRY

This was the beginning—the beginning of the celebrated dinosaur quarry which was to yield such a multitude and variety of ancient forms to science, and eventually lead to the establishment of Dinosaur National Monument.

Douglass proceeded to dig into the solid rock along those original eight tail bones and found other parts of the skeleton. In time, the almost complete frame of the Apatosaurus was exposed. The skull was missing and parts of the limb bones, but this was to be expected, as fossil vertebrates are rarely preserved in their entirety. What was not expected were the remains of a smaller dinosaur comingled with those of its huge contemporary.

EXTENT AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE FIND

Douglass was elated. This was more than a “one strike”! How much more, only further digging would tell. Sensing a large-scale operation, he informed the Carnegie Museum of his prospects and readied things with the intensity of a man at the gate of destiny. From the neighboring ranches he recruited men, horses, and equipment. He sent for his wife and child. He constructed a road to the discovery site, built a five-room cabin out of logs and lumber, converted a sheepherder’s camp wagon into an office, selected ground for future planting, bought a cow. A forge was set up. Tools were purchased.

Back at the museum, Andrew Carnegie, himself, evinced interest. He had always wanted something “as big as a barn” for his institution. A special annual field fund of $5,000 was added to the regular budget to carry on the work.

Within a year, Douglass and his men had run a cut over a hundred feet long in the hard sandstone, digging down along the almost perpendicular slant of the rock. At the base of this, rails were laid and small mine carts introduced to haul away the cuttings from the rapidly developing quarry.

New specimens appeared: A small plant-eating dinosaur known as Dryosaurus; an armored form called Stegosaurus; and another large creature like the Apatosaurus. Best of all, the Apatosaurus No. 1 was well on its way out of the rock and would soon be ready to ship to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.

In 1913, after 3 years of laboratory work in the Carnegie Museum the big Apatosaurus was on its feet in the Hall of Vertebrate Paleontology—1 of the 4 mounted specimens of this genus in the country and the most perfect of all. Prepared and erected by Arthur S. Coggeshall and his associates, it measures 71½ feet long and stands 15 feet tall at the arch of the back.

As the excavating progressed it was not long before the diggings became what is known to the profession as a “general quarry.” Dinosaurs of “all kinds and sizes” were showing up. Other quarries of this type had been developed in previous years in the Morrison formation at Como Bluff, Wyo., and Canon City, Colo., but they contained nothing like the variety of forms found here. Moreover, these at the monument were better preserved and the skeletons more intact.

The remains most frequently encountered in the diggings were those of sauropods—the huge plant-feeding dinosaurs with long tapering extremities that lumbered about on four pillar-like legs. Camarasaurus and the larger Apatosaurus were typical members of this group, and their numerous bones show them as being common animals of their time.

More common were the Diplodoci, of the exaggerated neck and even longer whiplash tail. This genus distinguished itself by producing not only the largest amount of skeletal material from the quarry, but also the largest number of skulls—those rarest of fossils. One skull was found in exact position with the neck bones, which settled all doubts as to the details of this animal’s head piece. The longest Diplodocus to come from the monument extended 75½ feet.

Contrast this with the diminutive Laosaurus, a 2½-foot biped which ranks as the smallest dinosaur yet taken from the deposit. This tiny creature had hollow limb bones and was one of the agile, quick-running types. Only one was found. When discovered, Douglass thought it a “baby” dinosaur, but study proved it to be a full-grown specimen. The condition of the skeleton reflected considerable agitation before and after burial. It lay on its back, the limbs distended. The tail was gone and the skull crushed.

In many respects, the most interesting dinosaur found was the sauropod, Barosaurus. It was an extremely long-necked form, some of the individual cervical vertebrae measuring 3 feet in length. Two specimens were excavated.

The flesh-eaters, as might be expected from their scarcity in other localities, made but a small showing. Two specimens of Antrodemus were unearthed. Thirty feet long, this animal was the ranking predator of its day, although hardly comparable to the towering Tyrannosaurus that entered upon the earthly scene at a later age.

Stegosaurus remains—so abundant that Douglass grew tired of them—added a bizarre note. An armored form, it was equipped with a frill of bony plates that extended the length of the back and terminated in a pair of sharp spines. Its chief claim to fame rests in its supposed two sets of “brains,” one a motor-control center situated in the hip region, and the other in the usual place.

Everywhere they dug, the excavators found fresh material—a vast jumble of bones so concentrated and intermingled as to make it difficult to distinguish one specimen from another. Douglass was amazed. Obviously, it was not with animals of a single area that he was dealing, but of an entire region. He was dealing with a dinosaur fauna. He was also perplexed. How did so many different types happen to occur in one small locality?

Slowly, as Douglass’s acquaintance with the deposit grew, the answer came. It was, he reasoned, the work of a river. The sandstones were ancient sediments. In their structure and composition lay the story of swift swirling currents. The coarse granular texture told of fast water; the crossbedding, of shifting channels; the grouping of the bones into clusters, of eddies.

It all added up to an old delta deposit at the mouth of a river, a region of bars where the carcasses of dinosaurs brought down stream accumulated. Settling, the great hulks became buried as they sank into the receptive sand. A number of carcasses multiplied ... and slowly, as flesh and ligament decayed, the bones became mingled, eventually to petrify and remain preserved through the ages.

WORK METHODS

At the quarry, excavating continued summer and winter. The methods employed were those that paleontologists had used for decades. There was no compressed air, no labor-saving devices. The work was done by hand. The crew, which seldom exceeded four men at any one time, became veterans in the art of fossil extraction. The bone was brittle; the encasing sandstone, hard. It required toil, patient direction, and a knowledge of anatomy.

Judiciously placed charges of giant powder shattered the overburden. Hand drills, wedge-and-feather, and crowbar worked the rock away, until the bone layer was encountered. The slow attrition by hammer and chisel accomplished the final delicate separation of the remains from the enclosing matrix. Team-and-scraper and small handcarts removed the rubble that swiftly accumulated in the cut. As the bones were chiseled from the quarry face in large blocks of rock, they were encased in strips of burlap dipped in flour paste. (Later, plaster of Paris supplanted the flour paste.) Then they were lowered by rope onto a mule-drawn skid and “snaked” down the trail into the gulch to await boxing.

Transporting the fossils from quarry to railhead was a major undertaking. It required wagon trains—4-horse teams hauling high-wheeled freight wagons over 60 miles of rutted roads to Dragon, Utah. There the precious goods were loaded onto boxcars of the now abandoned narrow gauge Uintah Railway, later to be transhipped to the standard gauge Denver & Rio Grande line at Mack, Colo.

FURTHER DEVELOPMENT

Specimens continued to show in record abundance, most of them duplicating the earlier finds of Diplodocus and Stegosaurus. But there were new forms, too. One of them was a Camptosaurus, the first to be found at the quarry. It was a modified biped of plant-eating habits, a little more than 10 feet long, with its skull and part of the tail missing.

By 1921 the deposit had been worked to a length of 400 feet east and west, and to a depth of about 60 feet. Rock was being stripped from the quarry face at the rate of approximately 20,000 cubic feet annually, and the chisels of Douglass and his men had penetrated to the richest bone-bearing zone.

In the following year they uncovered one of the most perfect skeletons of a dinosaur ever exhumed. It was a small sauropod named, Camarasaurus lentus. When found, its 17-foot vertebral column was practically intact, except for a few tail segments. The skull was in place, and the limbs in their approximate positions.

It was an important find scientifically. The position of the limbs gave clear evidence of the manner in which these animals carried themselves. The articulation between the thigh bone and the pelvis showed conclusively that sauropods walked with their legs more-or-less vertical to the body and not with the bowed-out crawling posture habitual to lizards, as many scientists had supposed. The skull was the finest known for this genus. It was complete even to the sclerotic ring—a complex of bony plates which surrounded the living eye and protected it.