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Sunday, November 23, 2014 • Section E
Ensuring
basewide
health
Military, Page E5
Lifestyles: Jill Hambek 857-1938 or
1-800-735-3229; e-mail [email protected]
Carolyn Ferguson/Special to MDN
Paleontologist Jeff Person poses with a dinosaur fossil at The Heritage Center. The fossils and much more can be seen at the state’s free museum
in Bismarck.
Did Minot have Tyrannosaurus rex?
Best fossil clues remain thousands of feet below surface
By JOHN BECHTEL
For the Minot Daily News
North Dakota has always
been famous for its dirt. It
has exceptionally fertile soil
and has long been one of the
bread baskets of the country, if not the world.
It has been common
knowledge for decades that
North Dakota has oil
trapped deep in its shale,
but it has only been in the
last decade that technology
made extraction of that oil
economically feasible. Then
there’s the coal: North
Dakota has the second
largest lignite reserves in the
world, second only to
Australia, which is enough
lignite near the surface of
the ground to meet all North
Dakota’s energy needs (at
present rates of consumption) for about the next 800
years. Last, but by no means
least, North Dakota has one
of the finest historical texts
on the planet; it’s a story
buried in its rocks more
than in its books, often in
the same areas that produce
the food, coal and oil.
The story is written in a
special language, the language of fossils, and it takes
special scientists to read and
translate it. They are called
paleontologists, and in the
summer
months
the
prospectors among them
can be seen leading teams in
shorts and t-shirts and
armed with picks and mattocks looking for messages
from the past. The quarriers
carefully excavate the fossil
specimens and create “jackets” or plaster casts around
items for transporting back
to the shop. Home base is a
special lab on the ground
floor of the Heritage Center,
North Dakota’s largest
museum, located on the
132-acre campus of the state
capitol in Bismarck. There
the rock “mummies” are
unwrapped,
cleaned,
ground, air brushed and
identified with a jeweler’s
care. Once catalogued, the
samples are placed in the
¨ A fossil is on display at one of the museums at the Heritage Center in Bismarck.
¬ Paleontologist Becky Barnes examines
fossils at the Heritage Center.
Photos by Carolyn Ferguson/Special to MDN
collections storage area until
recalled by researchers and
scientists.
The story of these specimens has not been boring.
Fossil evidence has been
found of giant squid in
Pembina County in northeastern N.D., woolly mammoth in southeastern N.D.,
Triceratops (large horned
dinosaur) and a duck-billed
dinosaur
in
Bowman
County in southwestern
N.D., giant crocodiles in
western N.D., and a giant
ground sloth in south-central N.D. They have found
the giant Ice Age bison in
Mountrail and Williams
counties (a forebear of the
current bison, but twice the
weight with a menacing
seven-foot horn span.) And
yes, Tyrannosaurus rex (Trex) has been found near
Mandan.
What is a fossil? It is a
body part of some previously living organism that has
become mineralized, petrified, turned to stone. Fossils
are rare, because most
decaying remains of plant
and animal life are consumed by other organisms
and are ultimately returned
to the atmosphere as carbon
products. Sometimes the
fossil is gone, but an impression of it remains in stone.
How do paleontologists
know where to dig? When
something that appears to
be a fossil is discovered,
how do we know if it is
recent or prehistoric? How
do we know what plant, animal or living organism it
belonged to? How do we
know how old it was? How
do we know what body part
we are looking at, and how
do we know what the rest of
“it” looked like? Where was
it in the food chain? What
did it eat, and what was it
eaten by? How do we know
what to call it? What
species, genus, family,
order, class or phylum did it
belong to? All of these questions and their answers are
the domain of paleontologists, who are also historians, anatomists, forensic
detectives, geologists, with
additional extensive knowledge of botany, zoology,
archeology and anthropology.
Jeff Person, a staff paleontologist at the Heritage
Center
museum
in
Bismarck says he made his
career choice in 1991 at the
age of 17, when he worked
for two weeks with John
Hoganson, the first and only
state paleontologist in N.D.
constructing the skeleton of
the
huge
Highgate
Mastodon that today stands
in the center of the museum. He was hooked by the
end of those two weeks, but
it was not until 2008 that he
saw an ad for a paleontologist at the Heritage Center
and was interviewed again
by Hoganson. Jeff calls it his
dream job.
Becky Barnes, Jeff’s colleague and fellow paleontologist, cautions that the work
they do requires great
patience and attention to
detail. Fossils that are millions of years old are not
replaceable.
The Heritage Center,
which Jeff and Becky now
view as their professional
home, doubled in size in
2014 with a $52 million
addition. It is the exhibition
hall, not just for paleontology, but for the 600-millionyear history and pre-history
of North Dakota, with all of
the geological, climatic,
environmental, biological
and cultural changes and
exchanges right up to the
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present day, with indications about the future. It
covers periods of geologic
time all the way back to
when most or all of the state
was under shallow oceans
of water from the Arctic to
the Gulf of Mexico; with the
Rocky Mountains pushing
up through the crust of
earth to the west. You can
walk through these “deep
water exhibits” as if on the
bottom of the ocean, and
suspended from the ceiling
you will see the 24-foot
mosasaur (marine predator)
found near Cooperstown, a
16-foot prehistoric fish, and
a 12-foot long sea turtle (all
cast).
In time, western North
Dakota resembled what is
today the Louisiana bayou
country or the Florida
Everglades, with a subtropical climate and a huge delta.
In the museum you can see
a life-sized Triceratops face
off against a T-rex. Through
computer animation you
can watch them in combat.
You can see a duck-billed
dinosaur leg bone that
shows teeth marks left by a
T-rex, and there is a
Triceratops brow horn that
you can actually touch.
Exhibit follows exhibit,
taking you through a tour of
prehistoric times, with fossils set off by wall murals
depicting what North
Dakota probably looked like
during each time period.
From swampland to savanna, you see remains of creatures you’ve never seen
before and names you’ve
never heard of and would
probably be hard pressed to
pronounce. The last significant climate change was the
Great Ice Age which came
down from Canada and
scraped everything before it.
It was these glaciers that
dragged and dropped rocks.
It was the movement of
these ice packs, some a mile
or more thick, that buried
some fossils deeper in earth,
waiting to be reclaimed.
Last stop on our paleontology tour is the Learning
Lab where you can watch a
video excavation of a 60million-year-old crocodile
skull and preparation of the
fossil for exhibit. Here as
elsewhere, it won’t be just
the children who are craning their necks to peer, gawk
and stare in amazement.
See T-REX — Page E8
E8
Minot (N.D.) Daily News, Sunday, November 23, 2014
Life
T-rex
Continued from Page E1
And when the docents bring classes of school children through on
guided tours, it is permissible for
adults to eavesdrop while pretending to look at something else.
The Department of Mineral
Resources publishes Geo News, a
beautiful, glossy and FREE magazine-quality newsletter, available
electronically or in print. You can
download the current issue at
www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/newsletter. For the past 14 years, North
Dakota’s state paleontologist John
Hoganson, now retired, has
encouraged interested members
of the public to accompany specialists from the Geological
Survey staff on paleontological
digs, with an enthusiastic
response. The digs last up to a
week or so, and may be free or
require a nominal contribution to
attest to your commitment to
showing up. You have to be at
least 15 years of age to participate,
and your food, lodging and transportation are usually your responsibility. There is no upper age
limit as long as you can handle
the work. The 2015 planned digs
will be announced in the January
2015 issue of Geo News. The bad
news is space is limited (only 10
or 15 participants across all sites),
there are no reservations, and it’s
first-come, first served. A word of
caution is advised: Past participants have been known to
become aspiring paleontologists.
Some have even made important
career decisions based on brief
exposure.
The Innovation Gallery is
about the early people of North
Dakota, beginning about 13,000
years ago and up to the 1860s. The
Inspiration Gallery takes you on a
tour of technology; agricultural,
industrial and energy; immigration and migration; conflict and
war. Remember those lazy windmills on route 83 south of Minot;
you know, the ones that are moving so slow? Those blades are so
big, the tips of them are moving at
almost 200 mph.
If you are a Baby Boomer, you
might remember the bomb shelter
craze in the 1950s and 60s when
everyone who had $5,000 in loose
cash laying around built their own
personal underground bunker to
Photos by Carolyn Ferguson/Special to MDN
¨ Dinosaurs are displayed at the Heritage Center. Long ago, dinosaurs roamed throughout North Dakota and full fossils have been found at different locations in the state.
∂ Paleontologists Jeff Person and Becky Barnes look through some of the fossils
housed at the Heritage Center.
survive the nuclear Armageddon
we were all expecting. There’s an
exhibit for a missile silo, and you
will be glad to know they’ve
upgraded the computers, and the
missile silo command centers now
enjoy flat screen TVs.
The coal we talked about in our
opening paragraph? It is just
below the surface in most of the
mining areas, and super heavy
equipment called draglines are
used to expose the vein of lignite.
One swipe of the shovel on one of
these removes 125 cubic yards of
dirt. When the bucket is full it is
pulled back with a chain by a
huge tractor, each link of which
weighs 300 pounds.
In
the
mid-1950s,
the
Minnesota-based company Louis
& Cyril Kelly designed a maneuverable self-propelled loader for
poultry farmers. In 1958, the
Melrose Manufacturing Co. of
North Dakota bought the rights to
build this machine. The M200
was the second model made, and
the name of it was changed in
1962, to, yup, the ubiquitous
Bobcat.
In the new Governor’s exhibit
hall, the display tells the story of
the electrification of North Dakota.
At one exhibit, you hear the
recorded voice of a Minot woman
who was so excited because she
had gotten an electric iron for
Christmas. When electric service
was first available in 1948, she
said this was “the most wonderful
day of my life” and she ironed all
day and it was so much fun. When
was the last time you had that
much fun? It’s all in one’s perspective, isn’t it?
Did you know that the U.S.
Congress denied and delayed
North Dakota’s acceptance as a
state? Can you guess why? Or that
the small farmers of North Dakota
were at one time considered under
the control of party bosses and big
business
interests
from
Minneapolis-St. Paul, who owned
or controlled the banks, the grain
mills and the railroads in North
Dakota?
So,
did
Minot
have
Tyrannosaurus rex running
around 65 million years ago? Yes,
but the rocks that contain their
fossilized remains are thousands
of feet below the surface. But even
so, where else can you go outside
North Dakota and be a weekend
paleontologist? Before you volunteer, why not make the easy day
trip to Bismarck sometime soon,
visit the beautiful Heritage Center
and bone up on some past history?
Almost 100,000 visitors already
have, just since the recent renovation.
U.S. Highway 83 South
becomes State Street as you enter
Bismarck. After you cross I-94, if
you make no turns, you will find
yourself at the parking lot
entrance to the museum. It couldn’t be any easier. The Heritage
Center is open from 8 a.m. to 5
p.m. Monday through Friday, and
10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and
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