Looking for Dinosaurs - July 22, 2014

There are very few places in the world where nature has reveled the foundation of the earth in such a spectacular display.  We are lucky that we have the area of Northeastern Utah and Northwestern Colorado  where such display of the earth structure is reveled for us to see.  Try to think of the earth's surface as a multilayer cake, where each layer is strata in the earth that was deposited over millions of years.  Now, imagine that you can cut that cake from top to bottom in an angle and then you turn the piece on its side showing a cross section of all the layers.  Then you conveniently scrape out some of the edges of each of the layers so as to see what each layer contains.  That is exactly what has happened in the southern Flaming Gorge region of Northern Colorado and Utah downriver from the Flaming Gorge Dam.  A representation of the cross section of the strata is illustrated below:

Current view if the "Cake Layer"

One of the strata (layer of cake) represents a period of about 130 million years ago - a time when dinos such Allosarus hunted its prey of "vegisaruses" having a nice pleasant meal on the greenery of the riverbank.  Try to imagine a river that flowed through this area and many types of dinosaurs living in the river valley.  Just like today, they had their wet and dry seasons and some of the dry season were very dry to a point that many of the dinosaurs died of thirst.  Some of them just laid with they fell, other were scavenged.  Later, with the wet season the river would flow and carry all the carcasses down river where they were trapped in a "bone-jam."  Now imagine a big flood one spring and many dinosaurs are caught in the riverbed.  The flood drags them tumbling end over end and desperate dinosaurs trying to get out of the water but the logs and branches from the trees knock them over and sucks them underwater.  The poor creatures end up drowned in the "bone jam" down river.   The flood and future floods and river flow deposits silt on these carcasses and all the dinosaurs get buried under the silt and preserved.  Over the years and centuries, they began to fossilize and more deposits are made by the river and wind and they are entombed in the strata that millions of years later get turned to rock.  Millions of years after that, tectonic movements uplift the strata and erosion by water, wind and weather reveal the dinosaur devastation that occurred 130 million years ago.  That is what can be seen at Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado.

We even get to see dinosaurs footprints. This Allosorous must have been walking on the soft mudy shore of the riverbed just before the beginning of a log dry spell.

 

We came down US 191 from Wyoming to Vernal, Utah - a very scenic road, but not a good road for  trucks and campers like ours with bad brakes - 8% grade for most of the 20 miles down one of the most treacherous mountain roads I have ever seen.  Very few truckers (and mostly ones with empty loads) dare to use this road.  Like us, on the return trip, manage to circle around although the "circling" adds over a hundred additional miles to the trip.  But it's a good alternative to "death over a cliff."

The opportunity to see this dinosaur quarry is a great experience that we all should make an effort to see (but don't take 191 south from Wyoming if your car does not have good brakes!)

The town of Vernal wants to claim its dinosaur status.