Home / News / State and Regional / Wyoming News Another Jurassic park?
October 07, 2012 2:35 pm • By KRISTY GRAY Casper Star-Tribune
ALLEN L. COOK SPRING CREEK PRESERVE, Wyo. – A century ago, fossil diggers descended upon tracts of short‐grass prairie much like this one and tore into them with picks and shovels. University of Pittsburgh student Aimee Hecht, a bio‐environmental studies major, sifts through sediment looking for micro‐vertebrate fossils at the University of Wyoming in July. Scientists have found two micro‐vertebrate sites this summer on the preserve with turtle shells, croc teeth and other small fossils. Scientists from the most important natural history museums in the country — and their hired crews — harvested Jurassic fossils by the train‐car load and shipped them east on Union Pacific rail tracks. The museums – including the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the American Natural History Museum in New York City and The Smithsonian – started their dinosaur collections generally or their Jurassic collections specifically in famous fossil quarries located just miles from this stretch of sagebrush covered field. In the 1800s, during the Great Dinosaur Rush, the hunt for large trophy fossils was so furious that some crews destroyed their quarries behind them to “protect” their discoveries from competing museums. Fossils of smaller animals and plants were often tossed aside. More than a hundred years later, on a hot July afternoon, a dozen University of Pittsburgh students surround a new dinosaur pit, The Doc Quarry on the Allen L. Cook Spring Creek Preserve in Albany County. The quarry has much in common with the famous dinosaur beds of long ago. Here, dinosaur bones lie on the surface, and Morrison Formation rocks suggest the presence of Jurassic‐era plants and animals – Diplodocus, Allosaurus and Stegosaurus. There is one major difference. The Doc Quarry has not yet been pilfered. Located almost exclusively on private land for the last 100 years, the 6,000 acres now called the Allen L. Cook Spring Creek Preserve survived the fossil rush unmolested. Walking along a ridge near the Doc Quarry, students can point to rocks with the tips of their field boots. “This is what a dinosaur bone looks like,” said Mike Rhodes, bending to pick up an orange‐ish pebble with rounded edges. A hundred and fifty million years ago, there was likely a stream rolling through here, Rhodes says. He can tell by the sandstone conglomerate, cementing smooth chunks of rock and fossilized bone. Rhodes is an environmental science major from the University of Pittsburgh, one of a dozen students in the university’s Wyoming Field Studies Program. Each year, the program brings Pitt students to Spring Creek Preserve to study paleontology, geology, archaeology, history and more. Rhodes points to small holes dug into the ridge. In 1999, paleontologist Kelli Trujillo and a paleontologist from the Denver Museum of Natural History brought a scintillometer to detect radioactive dinosaur bones just below the surface. They dug small holes to mark wherever they got a reading. The prairie is dotted with them. In the coming years, students and scientists will study this relatively newly discovered Jurassic Park in Wyoming, an area similar to what dinosaur hunters of old would have encountered a century earlier. “It’s exciting to look at the same place, 100 years later, with modern methods and science and see how different it is,” said Ed McCord, director of the preserve and director of programming for the University of Pittsburgh Honors College which runs the field study program. n n n In December 2005, Wyoming rancher Allen Cook donated about 4,700 acres to the University of Pittsburgh, including the outcroppings of Morrison Formation. The university also has leasehold interests for about 640 acres of state land close to the Spring Creek Preserve. The Honors College oversees the educational and research programs on the property. Pitt collaborates with the University of Wyoming, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the National Aviary in Pittsburgh, with instructors from each coming to lecture or lead students in field work. UW researchers get access to the University of Pittsburgh Wyoming Field Studies Program student Greg Hemenway, left, sits preserve for study and to teach their own with Colorado State professor Richard Adams at a Native American surface survey site as they examine a tool Hemenway found on July 19. Adams visits with Pittsburgh students students, said Kelli Trujillo, a each year to share his expertise on Native American archeology. paleontologist and manager of the UW Geological Museum. She is also a collaborating instructor in Pitt’s Wyoming Field Studies Program. “It benefits UW by giving access to a very unspoiled area for research and teaching that is less than an hour from Laramie, and allows them to collaborate with Pitt in ways that might not have come up otherwise,” she said. Every summer, McCord drives one of two University of Pittsburgh vans 1,500 miles to Rock River, a town of about 245 people in Albany County. Students arrive soon after, and the group takes over the Longhorn Lodge. They stay for six weeks. McCord grew up in Florida, surrounded by water and everything it brings: turtles, snakes, shore birds and horizon views that stretch into infinity. Now, he spends much of his summers on this grass prairie. “I was looking out across the grassland, and you would feel the wind and you would hear it and you would see it rippling through grass in waves. And I thought, ‘This is just like the Gulf.’ Often, this landscape looks like this vast undulating ocean,” he said. The Spring Creek Preserve has become a living classroom, with lessons in ecology, archaeology, history, literature and more. This mixed‐grass prairie, which once stretched across the west, is home to swift fox, mountain plover, raptors and other wildlife growing more scarce throughout the region. Students and instructors have identified fire hearths, grinding stones, 60 to 70 teepee rings and some arrow points dating back 9,000 years. The original grade of the 1869 Transcontinental Railroad runs through the property and the foundations of the railroad town Rock Creek can still be found on neighboring property. Owen Wister wrote “The Virginian” about the historic hotel just 20 miles away. University of Pittsburgh also offers a 16‐day course for four to five art students. They take over Rock River’s abandoned bank building, creating paintings, sculptures, prints and other works inspired by the land’s colors, animals and history. Students in the Wyoming Field Studies Program are not all or even mostly studying paleontology or geology. The course emphasizes field techniques, but is about sparking learning in a wide swath of disciplines. “I like to think I pull my weight despite being the token humanities major,” says Cassidy Stephens, 19, an English writing and physics major. He likes to think that walking through 150 million years of history on one hill will inform his writing as much as anything else he could have done this summer. “It gives me perspective,” he says. “I’m walking on the bones of creatures 20 times my size which have been dead longer than I can even conceive. You can’t conceive 150 million of anything. “But when you see it, when you physically see the rocks and the bones and the grasses and the sage, it hits you because we’re visual creatures.” n n n In 1898, famous steel tycoon and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie picked up a New York newspaper with this headline: “The Most Colossal Animal Ever on Earth Just Found Out West.” It included an illustration of a long‐necked dinosaur rearing up on its hind legs, peeking into an 11th‐story window of the New York Life Building, according to “Bone Wars: The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie’s Dinosaur” by Tom Rea of Casper. Carnegie wanted one. He sent to Wyoming William Holland, director of Carnegie’s museum and president of the University of Pittsburgh. On July 4, 1899, 25 miles from the Doc Quarry on the Spring Creek Preserve, Holland and his crew unearthed Dippy, the first Diplodocus carnegii ever found. Dippy still stands in the Carnegie Museum, 113 years later. “This find marked the beginning of dinosaur research here at the Carnegie, sparking a series of important fossil discoveries that continue to this day. So searching for dinosaur remains at Spring Creek is an exciting, and some ways emotional, experience for me,” said Matthew Lamanna, Carnegie’s assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology. He was among the team that first explored the property in 2007 and has lectured for the Wyoming Field Studies Program. “I’m almost literally following in the footsteps of the paleontologists who got dinosaur research at my museum off the ground.” There is a feeling among some paleontologists that the Morrison Formation has sort of been done, that the exciting discoveries will be made in older geological beds in China, Argentina or Egypt. But in the last decade, three new Jurassic dinosaurs have been discovered in the Morrison, and scientists are finding that Jurassic dinosaurs didn’t all live at the same time, says Mandela Lyon, a Wyoming Field Study Program instructor and a science educator at the Carnegie. Perhaps more importantly, there is value in knowing what happened 150 million years ago, in understanding how things change over time. “The purely romantic aspect of it,” Lyon says, “is that dinosaurs are amazing. They are the first thing many people learn about. From there, kids who have these obsessions with dinosaurs branch out and learn about all the other kinds of science. They are almost like the gateway drug to science.”