A Western Diary IX
Bill Long 6/27/05
The Dinosaur National Monument (UT and CO) on 6/24
One of the most remarkable sights I witnessed on my trip (or any other trip, for that matter) was the 55' high wall (about 200' in length) in the Dinosaur Quarry at the Dinosaur National Monument located about 5 miles north of Jensen, Utah. This wall, slanting at about a 60 or 70 degree angle, preserves in situ hundreds of fossilized bones of the Jurassic dinosaurs-- Camarasaurus, Apatoaurus, Diplodocus, Barosaurus and Stegosaurus. I thought for a moment that the fossils before me were replicas and that some museum in New York of Philadelophia had the originals, but I was mistaken. But, in order to understand how and why this wall appeared as it did, a few historical notes are appropriate.
Andrew Carnegie's Museum
The first major dinosaur finds in the Western US happened in the 1870s. For the next few decades the pace of discovery and naming of new species was feverish, with Cope (of Philadelphia) and Marsh (of New Haven) competing in the "bone wars" for prominence in this process. The Scotsman Andrew Carnegie got into the act in the early part of the 20th century, and built a huge exhibit hall in Pittsburgh for a dinosaur he didn't yet have. Well, he did have the so-called Diplodocus carnegii, found in WY in 1900, and it was assembled finally in 1907, but he wanted another dinosaur. He hired Earl Douglass, a Minnesota native trained as a plant biologist but who had, since the 1880s, gone on fossil-finding missions in the Intermountain West, to bring him back a dinosaur. Douglass went out with the director of the Carnegie Museum, Dr. W.J. Hollanld, in 1908 to the Green River area of Northeast Utah, coming back with nothing satisfactory in the way of dinosaurs. So, he returned in 1909 and struck paydirt.
Douglass' Diary
His entries for August 12 and August 17, 1909 are instructive. "August 12: Went out prospecting North of Vernal again coming out of the gulch I went in the day before. Found Dinosaur bones but nothing good. Saw broken remains of a little fellow." Then, on the fateful day of August 17:"At last in the top of the ledge where the softer overlying [sandstone] beds form a divide--a kind of saddle, I saw eight of the tail bones of a Brontosaurus in exact position. It was a beautiful sight...It is by far the best looking Dinosaur prospect I have ever found." When these bones were unearthed, it would yield a much more complete find, and this became fossil # 1, the Apatosaurus louisae.
A Digression on Brontosaurus/Apatosaurus
Before going on to tell more about this amazing site, I need to digress for a moment on the names of Brontosaurus and Apatasaurus. Douglass said he found a Brontosaurus, yet it is known as an Apatosaurus. What is up with the terminology? Indeed, since 1974 the term Brontosaurus is not used anymore, even though it was the term I grew up on when I learned about dinosaurs for the first time around 1960. The Brontosaurus, or "Thunder lizard," was supposed to have been so big and heavy that it had to live in water--at least that is what the artistic depictions of Brontosaurus in my circa 1960 textbooks showed.
Here, however, is how the confusion arose. In 1877 Othniel C. Marsh of Yale University found bones of a large sauropod he called an Apatosaurus. Two years alter, his teams found a nearly complete skeleton from the Lake Como area (WY). Marsh published information about this large dinosaur in 1883 and called it a Brontosaurus. Its name in fact was Brontosaurus excelsus. Yet, as scientists studied the 1877 and 1879 finds, they realized that they actually were the same genus. Thus, for decades the names Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were used interchangeably and the former name was used more prominently than the latter, but by 1974 paleontologists agreed to use the older term for both dinosaurs. This is an example of how you sometimes have to forget the knowledge you learned as a child in order to be in tune with contemporary scholarship.
Back to Douglass' Find
Douglass knew that his find was a major one. For the next 15 years teams of paleontologists from New York, Pittsburgh, and Washington, among other places, exposed large sections of the huge wall face where the eight Apatosaurus bones were found. The original wall was more than 75' in height and probably 400-500' long. More than 350 tons of bones and wall were shipped to the East to be analyzed and displayed. However, the part of the wall you see when you walk into the Dinosaur Quarry at the Monument today remained inaccessible to the paleontologists from 1909-1924. They removed parts to nearly wholes of the following dinosaurs:
1. Stegosaurus--#350--to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.
2. Camptosaurus medius --#370-- also to the Carnegie.
3. Dryosaurus altus--#26--also to the Carnegie.
4. Allosaurus fragilis--#202--also to the Carnegie.
5. Camarasaurus--#301--to the Smithsonian.
6. Stegosaurus--#39--to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
7. Diplodocus longus --#355--to the Smithsonian.
8. Diplodocus longus--#750--to Denver's Natural History Museum.
In addition, the Apatosaurus louisae was housed in the Carnegie and in 1922 the most remarkable find--a Camarasaurus lentus-- in an almost perfectly preserved articulated skeleton, is now in the Carnegie Museum. They also found two Barosaurus, which today find their homes in the Carnegie and the American Museum of Natural History. Other dinosaurs found were portions of a Ceratosaurus, Dryosaurus and Camptosaurus.
The next essay continues the discussion of the finds.
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