Washed Out Road
Well the first week of Burpee’s Utah Paleo-program started with a bang…..sort of. The Saturday before all the extra help arrived saw some of the worst storms and rains in the last 25 years. In fact there was flooding from Hanksville to Moab. All the rain made it nearly impossible to get to the quarry on Monday, so the we loaded up (all 30 of us) and headed to Capital Reef National Park. I had never been there before and was glad I went.
Katie & Carrie Plastering
Some spectacular geology visible there, from the Late Permian all the way to present. In addition the geology there are areas where ancient pictographs can be seen that were left behind by the Fremont Indians. By Tuesday it seemed like things were going to improve weather-wise so we went prospecting south of town in an effort to give our quarry road one more day of drying. As luck would have it one of our veteran volunteers Beverly Vaitkus found another dinosaur site, possibly the late Jurassic meat-eater, Allosaurus. Several bones were found including vertebra, ribs and some unknowns. As we were riding high on the new find, more rain decided to smack us in the face. All the drying that had occurred was now a moot point.
We spent Wednesday morning prospecting some new areas and found little. By 2:00 PM, I was ready to test my luck with the quarry road. I was lucky enough to find a few dry (sort of) areas and powered by way through to the quarry. I turned around and got everyone else to follow me. Even though we only had 4-5 hours in the quarry discovery upon discovery were made. Spirits were high again when we returned on Thursday and Friday putting in 9 hours each day. We removed the awesome sauropod humerus Maureen Mall found the week before (Dr. Bonnan is really excited about this specimen) found dozens of new bones including another huge humerus (upper arm bone) to an Apatosaurus (AKA Brontosaurus). This bone was over 3 feet long and in awesome condition.
Joe & Christine with Humerus
The credit goes to Joe Mongan who had been in a friendly competition all week with his father-in-law Herb Page over who would find the best bone. The winner would get an Estwing baseball cap (which I still owe Joe). We capped the week with a big pizza party and great stories. Here is the unofficial tally for the trip so far; 1) over 700 pounds of bones plastered and removed 2) over 40 new bones discovered so far. So how do you like them apples?
Maureen Mall With New Humerus
One of our veteran volunteers, Maureen Mall found a beautiful left humerus (upper arm bone) to another sauropod). Not to be outdone Dr. Bonnan’s students found several new bones as well. At this point the evidence seems overwhelming……this bonebed is no where near played out. There are hundreds of new discoveries to be made. We worked all through Thursday and Friday before rain chased us out Friday evening. It rained most of Saturday, day and night. We had really gully washers in Hanksville, as well as Moab where we spent our day off. Hopefully we will be able to get back into the field Sunday afternoon.
Sauropod Scapula and Fibula
NIU & WIU at Work
On Wednesday we were reinforced with several students from Western Illinois University, led by Dr. Matt Bonnan. As some you might recall WIU came out last year to help open the site and are fast becoming Burpee’s stalwart partners in this project.
Once we all got settled in the quarry, we continued to focus on removing some of the bones we had buried last year. Almost immediately, new bones near the “old” bones were found. Our new star volunteer, Doug Krueger found a huge sauropod femur right
- Doug With New Femur
next to the large scapula (shoulder blade) he had found a few days before. The new femur measures over four feet in length.
Hi everyone! I hope you are enjoying the museum’s new blog. Yesterday the Burpee crew and the Western IL University crew were rained out of the field, so we all spent some tourist time in Moab, Utah. Moab is a beautiful place with lots of curio shops and art galleries, not to mention amazing geology. We all drove through Arches National Park and enjoyed the formations carved out of Entrada and Navajo sandstone, then headed back to Hanksville with renewed energy. Unfortunately, we were rained out of the field again today, meaning another lost day of excavation. However, that means we all spent some time exploring the town of Hanksville and catching up on work that needs to be done indoors so it wasn’t a total loss. The scenery here is amazing, rain OR shine, and Utah smells uniquely lovely after a rain shower. All in all, Utah is an amazing place and well worth the visit- especially if there are dinosaurs involved! On another front, the lab is still up and running with volunteers and we are anxious to bring back even more material for everyone to work on. This site has lots to offer, and the crews are ready and waiting- whenever the rain stops!
Helmuth Redschlag Just Getting Started
The advance team spent the day opening the Hanksville-Burpee Quarry. This required a lot of shoveling and sweeping to remove the bones we had plastered last year. In a relatively short time large plaster “pods” began to emerge. Most of these jackets have partial sauropod (the big four legged,long necked/long tailed dinosaurs) skeletons like Diplodocus, Camarasaurus, and possibly Apatosaurus (AKA Brontosaurus).
Conditions were a little extreme as temperatures were 97 degrees with no wind and an unforgiving sun…..yeeeesh. But the suffering
Doug, Working a New Find
was well worth it because by mid-day new bones were already being discovered. Doug Krueger found two large bones, most likely a sauropod fibula (shinbone) and a large hip bone. Bill Harrison (you might remember as one of Jane’s co-finders) came across a nice tail vertebra to the same dinosaur. By about 4:00 PM it got to be too much, most of us looked like six foot lobsters so we called it a day. All in all a really good start.
Bill Harrison with Vertebra
Text and Photos By Scott Williams
Betsy Carlson all geared up.
Today we are kicking off the Family Fossil Field Trip (FFFT) season. At 1pm our first group met at Rockford Blacktop’s Trask Bridge Quarry for three hours of Ordivician fossil hunting. See the events page at www.burpee.orgfor details about signing up for these local fossil digs and Burpee’s Expeditions out west.
Also at 1pm the Burpee Explorers class celebrated Mr. T.’s 70th birthday!
Mr T
This Gulf Coast Box Turtle has been seen by visited by many generations of Rockfordian school children over the years.
Factory Butte
We headed over to the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) Office and met up with Sue Fivecoat and Buzz Rakow to check in. After getting up to speed we headed out to visit the Hanksville-Burpee Quarry. Once we arrived we spent a few hours prospecting the area and checking the site for vandalism. As some of you might know, last fall some of the dinosaur bones that we had plastered and buried became the victims of thievery.
Poach Pot
For the most part it seems that some of the material that was taken was small, easy to get to bones. However, we did find a very large hole that Josh could almost lay down in. It was not located in the main part of our quarry so we have no idea what was taken from there…..but it was big, possibly a big sauropod femur. The sad part is that people who do this are really stealing from themselves and their heritage. We will never know
Henry Mountains
what was really taken….was it a skeletal element to a new dinosaur? Perhaps an element that has never been fully described. In the end we all loose for someone to make a quick buck. Aside from this big hole, most of the site looked in good order.
Unexplored Territory
Josh and I made several visits to the site while we waited for our final permit. The remainder of the day was spent visiting several other promising localities and points of interest, including Factory Butte. This large exposure is a local sight-seeing place. It rises several hundred feet from the ground. Geologically it is an early Cretaceous marine deposit called the Mancos Shale. Oyster fossils can be found in the billions there and if you are lucky you can find some shark’s teeth. At the end of the day the realization that there is literally hundreds of miles of unexplored territory out there washed over us…..we have a lot of work to do.
Torrey's Peak and Gray's Peak
On Monday we took the scenic drive through the Rockies and left Colorado. Along the way, we got lucky again and saw over a dozen Big Horn Sheep rams near I-70. So a quick detour occurred and more awesome pictures were taken. If you never have had the opportunity to drive through the Rockies you should do so….it is beautiful.
Bighorn Rams
We stopped and took more beauty shots about 10 miles from Vale and continued on. After a few hours we dropped down and into Fruita, Colorado. Fruita is the home of the Dinosaur Journey Museum, which is run by Dr. John Foster and his wife Rebecca Hunt-Foster. Both are noted paleontologists and friends to the Burpee Museum. We spent a couple hours visiting with them and getting a tour of the museum.
For those interested in late Jurassic Dinosaurs, this is a place to visit. Some of the old dinomation robots are here as well. We said our good byes and headed the last leg for Hanksville, UT. After two more hours we arrived in Hanksville at 10:00 PM mountain time and settled into our new headquarters….the Henry Mountain Hideout. Next step….breakfast and checking in with the Hanksville BLM (Bureau of Land Management). Stay tuned….
Josh with a Stegosaurus
Allosaurus
Pike's Peak from below
AWESOME, AWESOME, and AWESOME!! As soon as we checked out of our hotel we entered Pike National Forest and began the nearly three hour drive up Pike’s Peak. Pike’s peak is one of the tallest peaks in the lower 48 states, standing at 14,110 ft above sea level. It was named after Lieutenant Zebulon Pike, an army officer who was sent by President Thomas Jefferson to map the mountains after the famous
a little windy
Louisiana Purchase.
Ok…history aside….although the temperature at the base (about 7000 feet above sea level) was around 60 degrees, things would change the higher we went. The drive should be more like 2 hours to the top…..but when every turn you make you have to stop to take a picture…things slow down. The forests are beautiful a mixture of tall pine and Aspen. Around 9000 ft up you start seeing some snow on the ground, by 10,000 ft a lot of snow. The mountain has granite exposures all over the place. From a geology point of view, it’s great.
Granite
The granite has big “chunks” of feldspars and quartz in it, the crystals very visible. This means that when this part of the mountain was an intrusive magma…it cooled very slowly allowing crystals to grow large. In retrospect….it’s probably a good thing that Betsy Carlson (one of Burpee’s intrepid Educators) was not with, otherwise we would be leaving with about half the mountain in our vehicle.
We saw wildlife signs all over the place. Notices for bears, coyotes, Elk, deer, bobcat, Mountain Lions and yes….even the elusive
Roadside Fox
Bigfoot. We see some wildlife here and there……but we made a friend early. A red fox came up to our vehicle to say hello. The little guy was adorable. He obviously knew how to play to the crowd, because he was constantly mugging for pictures. I probably took about 40 pictures of him alone. He was fairly tame and allowed me to get close enough for a smile and a wink. After this bit of good luck, we continued up…and up…and up. We passed 11,000 FT then 12,000 FT. The air grew cooler and cooler. Soon it was dropping below 40 degrees. We saw people skiing thousands of feet down on 70 degree slopes (they must be
See that crazy skier?
crazy!)……this picture I took shows a tiny little dot in the middle of the steep slope. We drove until we reached the furthest we could…..about 13,500 ft. The last 600 feet was blocked because of snow. The air temperature was 30 degrees (wind chill was more like 15)….30-40 mile an hour winds…snowing, top of the world….AWESOME. Josh and I walked around and got some great pictures (in between getting dizzy). It really is something to walk a bit and get vertigo due to lack of oxygen. It was a great day….we spent about 40 minutes nearly at the top before we made the painstakingly slow descent. Low gears and stops to rest the vehicle were the orders for the rest of the day…..loosing brakes at 13000+ is a bad day. All in all it was great…..I am already trying to figure out how to get back.
Mounted Dodo
right-whale
Well after months of planning the adventure to the Hanksville-Burpee Quarry has officially begun. Josh Mathews (one of Burpee’s top notch fossil preparators and a recent NIU Masters Graduate) left around 9:00 for our digsite located near the town of Hanksville, Utah. The whole trip is about 20 hours of driving so we were going to do it in stages. The first step….and arguable the most boring is the 13 hour drive to Colorado (which takes us through the long dark of western Iowa and Nebraska- No offense to any Cornhuskers or Hawkeyes out there). Our plans were to drive to Woodland Park, CO so we could visit the Dinosaur Resource Center Museum on Saturday morning. We made the decision to take a break early in the trip and stop at the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, in Iowa City. The Natural History Museum is an awesome place with a lot of history. It was founded in 1858 and has one of the best Biology Collections I have seen. It has several different large and exotic mounted mammal exhibits including a Giant Panda, Moose, Musk Oxen, Pronghorns, Apes and even Walrus. The museum also boasts an amazingly diverse osteology (skeleton) collection, the most
Moose
impressive specimen being a 45 foot long Right Whale Skeleton. Finally its bird collection reminds me of the old Burpee Museum exhibits. Thousands of birds from all over the world are displayed. Aside from birds of prey, songbirds, shorebirds the museum has one of the best Dodo restorations I have seen. All in all, this museum was the best diversion to take our mind off of the remaining hours of driving we had. For the record we made it into Colorado at 1:30 AM…..yeeeesh.
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