August 9: The Dinosaur Pit

We decided to spend the morning (and early afternoon, as it turned out) at the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry.

 I wanted to see some real dinosaur bones, not museum castings.

It was another dusty 20-mile drive into the desert to reach the quarry.  Two college-age national park “rangers” (summer rangers, we call them) meet us at the visitors’ center.  They were the only ones we met.  They responded to my impertinent smile by explaining that people did often show up on weekends.

What do they do all day, we wondered.

As it happened, all the displays were dinosaur bone castings.  “Duh,” was the look on the young female ranger’s face when I expressed disappointment.  (I guess actual bones are rather valuable commodities.)

The young male ranger gave us a lengthy disquisition on recent scientific theories about what caused the concentrated dinosaur deaths in this location and why it is a scientifically important place.  He must be very bored, I thought to myself.

When we finally got a chance to hike around the quarry (by ourselves),

we finally were able to locate some real dinosaur bones.  The dinosaur bone you see is the dark brown one in the photo.

 After oohing and awing, we placed it carefully back in the pile of small bones that had been intentionally left next to self-guided tour marker 9 for later tourists to play with.

We had discovered one interesting scientific fact, thanks to the eager ranger.  The Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry was first excavated in the late 1930s by Princeton paleontologists.  (I kept thinking, “Bringing Up Baby.”)  But as recently as 2001, University of Utah paleontologists conducted extensive excavations here, more scientifically.  The goal of dinosaur research, like modern archeological research, is no longer collecting museum curiosities but answering questions about culture, life, and death circumstances (“taphonomy,” if you want to use a big word).

The bones at this quarry were primarily from Allosaurus—the big guy.  What was surprinsing is that no complete or even partial skeletons were found here.  Skeleton fragments of hundreds of Allosaurs were seemingly randomly scattered over a very wide area, all within a three-foot layer of earth.  Moreover, most were juveniles.

Oops.  The old “tar/mud trap” theory of dinosaur taphonomy went out the window.  Everything I learned from my third grade science teacher was wrong.  Not even partially complete skeletons were found.  The could not have been trapped or buried.  They could not have died of poisoning.  The bones could not have been washed here by a river, since no significant flora remains were in the dinosaur strata.

Another mystery from the past.  What was my explanation, the quarry guy queried?  The current scientific explanation is “who knows?”

Without any modesty whatever, I proferred a suggestion based on my own experience.  “Looks like a great dinosaur barbecue pit to me,” I suggested.  All the bones randomly thrown away by other fat allosaurs.  Do dinosaurs eat their own?, I wondered; why not?  This has since been called the “Dinosaur Barbeque” theory.  “Stupid tourist jokes again,” said the look on the ranger’s face.  He had obviously never been to Syracuse.

On to Price.