Category Colorado

Walking With Dinosaurs: Dinosaur Ridge

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If you’re into dinosaurs and paleontology, Colorado is an excellent place to visit. The Morrison formation has been one of the most fertile sources of Jurassic fossils in North America, but more than that, it was one of the main sites of the Bone Wars between Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope in 1877.

Cope and Marsh loathed each other with a passion that made for excellent stories but terrible scientific method; not only would they rush to be the first to name new species (resulting in misidentifications like the Brontosaurus), but they’d also sabotage each other’s sites, bribing, stealing, destroying fossils, and each trying to ruin the other’s credibility so as to cut off his funding. Basically, if these guys were around today, we’d ask them to celebrity box or kiss and get it over with. Or there’d be a reality show: EXTREME PALEONTOLOGY. As it stands, they made both enormous contributions and did substantial harm to the field, discovering species while yet reportedly blowing up others with dynamite; their lasting animosity left both destitute, and yet they still would not yield. Before his death, Cope issued a challenge to Marsh by donating his skull to science, his desire that Marsh do the same so that their brains could be measured to “prove” which was more gifted. Though as we know, brain size is not an indicator of intelligence, and they’d both be dead anyway, so I suppose it was just a matter of getting it in the fossil record. Marsh never took Cope up on the bet, but Cope’s skull is still hanging out at the University of Pennsylvania today.

What makes Colorado so awesome for paleontologists, aside from apparently easy-access dynamite? Well, it was above water during the Jurassic and underwater during the Cretaceous, which means that it has an astounding diversity of fossils–dinosaurs, plants, and marine reptiles. The area was then uplifted by the formation of the Rocky Mountains, and at the Morrison formation, a creek carved through it, exposing the strata of Mesozoic and Paleozoic sedimentary rocks. Excavation is no longer happening at the Morrison formation, but you can tour and see all of these things for yourself: it goes by the more tourist-friendly name Dinosaur Ridge. You can do a self-guided tour and hike up Dinosaur Ridge, or you can pay a nominal fee at the visitor center and take a guided tour on a shuttle bus. We elected for the guided tour, and you can decide for yourself whether it was laziness or the thirst for knowledge that drove that decision. P3230639

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P3230648I don’t want to spoil the story, but we only saw one of these things. And we saw a LOT of them.

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We arrived just in time to hop aboard the next shuttle bus. Unfortunately, so did several families with a veritable herd of children around the age of two. I believe that the scientific term for a gathering of children around that age is “a terror”. We should have waited for the next bus. It’s not that our shuttle guide wasn’t fantastic–she was! She was knowledgeable and enthusiastic, she was quick to point out photo opportunities, and she deserved every cent of the tour fee and tip we gave her.

Unfortunately, however, it was incredibly difficult to hear anything she had to say over the reverberating screams of that many children. I’m not saying this as an unreasonable kid-hater, I’m saying this as one of the only two people on that bus trying to hear the tour guide, the other being Jason. Literally no one else was paying attention to her. Not the screaming kids, not the parents with glazed-over eyes. She’d ask a question hoping for a response and get “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE” shouted back at her for her efforts. Hostage negotiation and traffic control are notoriously difficult jobs, but I’d put this at a close third. At least in those first two professions, you don’t spend any portion of your day hoping for the sweet release of death. I’m sure there are things I would have liked to have learned about whatever it is going on in the below photos, and I would have been happy to share that knowledge, but when I think back to this tour, I mostly just hear “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE” which is really only helpful if you’re looking to memorize some of the vowels.  Sometimes I think it would be helpful to travel around with a little notebook so I don’t forget important details, but in this instance, I think all that would have come from it was a series of furious scribblings of increasingly angry faces.

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One thing I did learn is that one way paleontologists quickly determine if they’ve found a fossil is to lick it, though the tour guide recommended that we not lick any of the fossils on site as they’ve been touched by many many many hands. I don’t know whether I’d rather lick a stranger’s hand or a coprolite, personally. Preferably neither. I also learned that the bulk of Allosaurus remains have come from this area, and that Allosaurus may have been a more badass dinosaur than the more popular T.Rex. T. Rex is widely believed to be a scavenger and carrion eater. Allosaurus is believed to have been more involved in active predation; with their incredible expanding jaws, they could eat a chunk out of live prey and run away, and even if they took a beating for doing so, they often lived to see another day.  Plus: usable arms.

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P3230659Dinosaur ridge needs to update their signs! Though “Apatosaur Bulges” doesn’t sound as pleasing to the ear.

P3230663The area the tour guide is standing in originally contained a fossil that was cut out by some modern-day fossil-wrecking buttwad, possibly a descendent of Cope (Marsh never married). It was eventually found (I am not making this up) propping open a door at the University of Colorado.

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The next bus that rolled up the hill only had two adults on it. Damn, we should have waited.

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Spotted on the Roadside: Giant Milk Can

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Who doesn’t like ice cream served out of a giant milk can? Little Man Ice Cream drew a crowd even on a cold March evening. You may ask yourself: “Self, even in this relatively large milk can, how could one possibly fit all of these flavors?” The answer is: they don’t, so I may never know what a Space Junkie actually tastes like, though Salted Oreo was at least interesting if not life-changing.

Spotted on 16th St in Denver.

Why’d they build this ghost town so far away?

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When I saw the brochure for “Ghost Town Wild West Museum” near Colorado Springs, I was under the impression that it was actually a ghost town with a wild west museum inside, something along the lines of Cripple Creek, only with something to do there other than gamble and be depressed. Now, the thought crossed my mind that it was awfully close to a major-ish city to be a ghost town, but my pressed penny-loving lizard brain pushed that thought away. When we pulled into the parking lot and saw one building, I knew I was right to be suspicious.

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The Ghost Town Wild West Museum is essentially a small-scale wild west town built inside of a warehouse. This isn’t to say it’s bad, it’s just not an actual ghost town, no matter how many times it says “authentic” in the brochure. It reminded me a lot of “The Streets of Yesterday” in The House on the Rock, but on a much lesser scale. After we paid our entry fee, I asked the employee if they had a pressed penny machine. She looked at me as though I had just sprouted a second head and said snottily, “We don’t have anything like that here.” I felt embarrassed until I walked in and saw that HALF THE DAMN PLACE WAS COIN-OPERATED. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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All of these machines, the shooting gallery, EVERYTHING cost extra and was coin-operated, but no, I could see how they’d be above something like a pressed penny machine. What bothers me is that they don’t have the decency to tell you outside that you need another ten dollars in quarters to see the attractions inside. House on the Rock also had a mess of coin-operated items, but they tell you in advance that you’ll need tokens and they even give you a handful. The Ghost Town Wild West Museum doesn’t even have an ATM if you wanted to withdraw cash to do these things, and then they have the audacity to have an animatronic prisoner who begs you for money to (I am not making this up) buy a gun.

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERASo on this “authentic” sign, we learn that old-timey miners used backwards letters to evoke a sense of false whimsy, like the ‘r’ in Toys ‘r’ Us.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAlso note the old-timey, authentic christmas lights.

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAOld timey authentic ghost town or hipster’s living room? YOU DECIDE.

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI told Jason to rob the bank, and with each progressive photo, I told him to make a meaner face. Meaner. MEANER! MEANER!

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThis animatronic guy claimed to have a cure for everything except baldness in men and “the gossip habit” in women. Fuck you, old timey asswad.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAPlease tell me this is the etymology of the phrase “horse pills”: human and horse-shared medicine.

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAIf you get the used soap, just consider that you’re getting pubes thrown in FOR FREE.

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Old timey town or a hipster’s living room? YOU DECIDE.

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This little girl is going to learn an important lesson about co-pays and deductibles, because this old timey doctor doesn’t work for free.

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I am going to install a skinny mirror in my house and use it exclusively. I’d better eat ice cream for breakfast again, I just can’t seem to gain weight!

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI really like Chester A. Arthur’s taste in bedroom sets, but his taste in quilts was apparently ghastly.

For an additional fee (surprise!), you can have your name printed into an old-timey newspaper. I decided they’d gotten enough out of me already and that a little photo editing would suit me just as well. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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