History and Development of the Quarry
DISCOVERY AND EARLY YEARS
No one knows how long the old bones had been weathering out of the
hills of what is now Dinosaur National Monument before the first man saw
them. Curious Indians, wandering between the upturned ridges of Mesozoic
rocks, picked up fragments and carried them off to their camps where
they are now found among the arrow points; ax heads, and corn-grinding
stones. In 1776, the Spaniard, Father Escalante, passed within sight of
today's dinosaur quarry, not dreaming of the antiquity hidden there.
Maj. John Wesley Powell, on his second voyage down the Green River in
1871, recorded the presence of "reptilian remains" in the area, but
wrote nothing more about them. Sheepherders, cattlemen, and hunters
observed them and were impressed in proportion to their understanding.
But, through all the years, the nature of the bones remained a
mystery.
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EARL DOUGLASS, DISCOVERER OF THE DINOSAUR QUARRY.
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Then, in 1893, this mystery was solved. O. A. Peterson, a scientist
from the American Museum of Natural History, while conducting field work
in the Uinta Basin to the south of the present monument boundaries,
discovered bones out-cropping from a recognized fossil-bearing stratum.
The stratum was the 140,000,000 year-old Morrison formation. The bones?
Peterson reported them as the remains of dinosaurs.
That report was to have an important influence, 15 years later, in
directing a fellow paleontologist from the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh
to investigate the area. Earl Douglass was the paleontologist's name. In
1908, he and W. J. Holland, Director of the Carnegie Museum, found
themselves in the region of Peterson's discovery, searching for dinosaur
remains. They extended their search to the north and thence along the
Morrison hogback that flanks Split Mountain. Bone was foundnot
much, but enough to bring Douglass back the following summer and in
company with George Goodrich, a local resident, to pursue the hunt.
The hunt came to a triumphant climax on August 17, 1909, whento
quote from Douglass's diary"At last in the top of the ledge where
the softer overlying beds form a divide . . . I saw eight of the tail
bones of a Brontosaurus [Apatosaurus] in exact position."
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. . . I SAW EIGHT OF THE TAIL BONES OF A Brontosaurus IN EXACT
POSITION." (from Douglass' Diary, 1909. Shown in photo is Douglass
assistant, Elder Goodrich.)
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STARTING THE QUARRY
This was the beginningthe 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.
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THE FIRST CUT IN THE QUARRY, AS IT LOOKED IN
1910. (Courtesy, A. S. Coggeshall.)
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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. Ar 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.
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SAMPLE VIEW OF DINOSAUR REMAINS AS THEY WERE UNCOVERED IN THE QUARRY.
THIGH BONE NEAR MAN. (Courtesy, A. S. Coggeshall.)
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In 1913, after 5 years of laboratory work in the Carnegie Museum the
big Apatosaurus was on its feet in the Hall of Vertebrate
Paleontology1 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 71-1/2 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
sauropodsthe 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 skullsthose 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 75-1/2 feet.
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QUARRY OPERATIONS. SAURISCHIAN PLASTERED PELVIS UPPER CENTER.
(Courtesy, A. S. Coggeshall.)
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Contrast this with the diminutive Laosaurus, a 2-1/2-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 remainsso abundant that Douglass grew tired
of themadded 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 materiala 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 no. 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 course 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 downstream
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.
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REMOVING A LARGE THIGH BONE FROM THE QUARRY WALL DURING THE CARNEGIE
MUSEUM OPERATIONS. (Courtesy, A. S. Coggeshall.)
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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.
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PLASTERED SPECIMEN REMOVED FROM THE QUARRY DURING THE CARNEGIE MUSEUM
OPERATIONS, (Courtesy, A. S. Coggeshall.)
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Transporting the fossils from quarry to railhead was a major
undertaking. It required wagon trains4-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
ringa complex of bony plates which surrounded the living eye and
protected it.
As exhibit material it was without rival. It was mounted as found,
lying on its side, the bones fixed in death in the matrix in which they
had been preserveda fitting climax to the 13 consecutive years
that had seen an unknown sandstone ridge in Utah become Dinosaur
National Monument.
In those 13 years the Carnegie Museum had taken from the quarry parts
of 300 dinosaur specimens, 2 dozen of which were mountable skeletons.
Ten different species were represented. It was the best collection of
Middle Mesozoic monsters in the world.
In the years that immediately followed, the still-rich "dig" was
worked by two other organizationsthe Smithsonian Institution and
the University of Utah.
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Camarasaurus SKELETONTHE MOST PERFECT REMOVED
FROM THE QUARRY. (Courtesy, Carnegie Museum.)
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But finally the museums had reaped their harvest. The fruits of the
harvest had gone to enrich many of their finest displays. However, still
buried in the untouched part of the wall were the remains of still more
dinosaurs. All that was needed was to reveal them. The 67° tilt of
the rock made it a perfect exhibit face. Strip off the overlying layers,
expose the skeletons, and relief them in place. This had been Douglass's
idea as far back as 1915, when he recorded it in his diary.
PROTECTING THE QUARRY
But Douglass was not the only one to realize the necessity of
preserving this unique fossil record of the dinosaurs for people of
today and the future to see on the spot. Officials of the Carnegie
Museum realized the extraordinary nature of the deposits and their
contribution to our knowledge of the past; and they were not long in
taking steps to protect the dinosaur quarry. To preserve it for science,
they sought to lay claim to it as a mineral property. But their claim
was disallowed by the U. S. Department of the Interior, because fossil
bones could not be classed as a mineral within the meaning of the mining
laws.
The museum pressed its case, this time with resultsbut not what
they expected. The outcome was not the establishment of a mere mineral
claim, but of a national monument. Under the provisions of the
Antiquities Act, to safeguard and preserve objects and areas of
significant scientific or historic interest, the dinosaur quarry and 80
acres of surrounding land were declared a national monument on October
4, 1915. Less than a year later it was included in the newly created
National Park System.
Several things contributed notably to this action to protect the
quarry. They were: the exceptional preservation of the bones; the
number, variety and completeness of the skeletons; the relative
abundance of skulls, consisting of 8 or more in a complete state, and
about an equal number of incomplete ones; and the finding of the first
complete tails.
In 1923, knowing that the quarry was protected, and that the
scientific collection of the fossil bones for museum exhibit was at an
end, Earl Douglass turned again to the idea of making a perfected
exhibit of the fossils right where they lie. His letter to Dr. Walcott,
secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, reads, in part, "I hope that
the Government, for the benefit of science and the people, will uncover
a large area, leave the bones and skeletons in relief and house them in.
It would make one of the most astounding and instructive sights
imaginable."
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ARCHITECT'S DRAWING OF VISITOR CENTER AT QUARRY SITE.
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This is precisely what the Government had in mind, and through the
agency of the National Park Service, intended to accomplish. Plans for
an in-place exhibit were drawn up. But many years were to elapse before
the plans passed from blueprint into reality.
In the meantime, the quarry entered the second phase of its
existence, a dormant period from a scientific viewpoint, but one in
which the forces of the future gathered ground.
During the 1930's the monument served as a transient camp. A. C.
Boyle was installed as resident geologist and custodian for the Park
Service. Under his guidance a program for the general development of the
area was carried on, financed largely by WPA funds. This entailed, among
other things, the deepening and widening of the quarry cut, and the
construction of buildings later to accommodate the monument staff and
exhibits.
The American Museum of Natural History became interested in the
development at this time and, through its curator of fossil reptiles,
Barnum Brown, sought to initiate a joint effort with the Park Service
for exhibiting the quarry remains.
PRESENT DEVELOPMENT
It was not until September 1953 that the years of Park Service
planning bore fruit, and the work of developing an in-place exhibit for
the monument was begun. Many factors operated to spring the project into
being, not the least of which was the active interest and wholehearted
support of Horace M. Albright, a former Director of the Service.
Theodore E. White, formerly with the Smithsonian Institution and with
Harvard University, was placed in immediate charge, under the
supervision of Jess H. Lombard, the superintendent of the National
Monument. His task, and that of his associates, was to expose the
remaining specimens in the quarry wall and work them out in
bas-relief.
A shelter had been built over the working space and power tools were
introduced for the first time. Using compressed air, the rock was scaled
off with jackhammers and "paving-breakers," until most of the overburden
had been removed. Subsequent probing into the bone layer was done with
smaller chipping hammers, mallet, and chisel. This operation continued
through 1954 and 1955 as, slowly and carefully, the extent of the
skeletal material was determined. It comprised parts of several large
dinosaurs, sufficient in quantity to justify the next stepthe
construction of a building to enclose the quarry face.
Erection of this unusual structure, the first of its design to be
attempted, commenced in 1957 and it was opened to the public in the
following year. Now, as one of the many development projects in its
MISSION 66 program, the National Park Service has resumed the delicate
work of uncovering this corner of the ancient world and preserving it
in-place for all time.
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