Search the Community

Found this rock on our place in southwest Colorado. It’s very different from most rocks here. With a little research I found we are located in the middle of the Morrison Formation! I’m interested to see if anyone could help identify it. Fossil or cool rock? Thanks for your input.

It is with a good bit of giddy enthusiasm that we share our very first Jurassic dinosaur fossils. We have a start to our Morrison Formation collection and I am so excited to take these into class. This is also a proud moment because my son and I earned these fossils with our hard work. This is a gift to our program from us and a gift to the kids we want to educate. They are also big hunks of dino bone. We needed a couple of larger bones for these programs for visual flair and these fit the bill for our budget. It will be a week before they arrive but I am too excited to wait lol One of the things we learned from our first dinosaur program was that 2nd graders learn about Diplodocus when they study dinosaurs. It was a species they knew. So we purchased a partial Diplo coracoid bone. It is a 15" x 11" x 9" hunk of dinosaur bone that weighs 12 lbs. Our largest and heaviest fossil. This one will really get the attention of the kids I think and gives us a the opportunity to feature Diplo in the program We also added two partial Camarasaurus ribs that fused together during fossilization. It is 14" x 9" so it is good sized and is a great example of the geological process they are learning about. This gives us an additional Sauropod to cover in the program and lest us talk more about niches. This will be a great fossil for the kids to touch as well. We are also adding a few pounds of chunkasaurus bones. Perfect dino fossils for hands on exploration and a few special give away dino bones too. The pictures are not great, not sure why but I will upload more when they arrive. Here are the big ones.... Picture 1- Diplo coracoid Picture 2 Cam ribs

Today is my last day off of work which means I have time to do fossil stuff. It is also the last day for a little while that I will be discussing dinosaur fossil very much. We have shark programs starting at the end of this month so my mind has to get back on the sharks. Dinosaurs go on the back burner again for awhile. I will post a bit more of the collection but I also wanted to share a little bit about my experience with Jurassic dinosaur fossils during the early stage of building our collection. Hopefully it provides something useful to another collector. As we started window shopping in preparation for beginning a dinosaur collection, one thing stood out about fossils from the Jurassic era. They are expensive. The prices are so far out of my range that I did not bother to research them beyond the ones we first encountered from various dealers. I would have to sell a kidney to get a hold of anything from that era. I saw sauropod teeth for up to 2500$ and none under 600. Don't get me started on theropods from that era. It all looked just too expensive. Our collection is built on inexpensive fossils from formations (Bull Canyon, Kem Kem, Judith River, Hell Creek) that produce some great bargain stuff. i saw nothing in the way of bargain fossils from the Jurassic beyond bits of bone or bits of bone assigned a species even though I doubt you could assign a species to those bits. They are chunkasaurus not Camarasaurus is my theory lol Anyway, I had little belief that we would add anything Jurassic except for the chunkasaurus bones for kids to handle. It did bother me though that we would have a glaring hole in the program. Kids associate the Jurassic era with dinosaurs and vice versa thanks to the movies Jurassic Park. Even if the dinosaurs from those movies were not Jurassic, the word association is unavoidable. I decided to back track the origins of the super expensive fossils from that era. I have a theory that there has to be a primary source for all of those high priced dealer bones. I think one or two entities probably supply the vast majority of fossils from the Morrison Formation which seems the primary formation for North America fossils out there. I think I was successful in the attempt to find one of the sources of the fossils. I have seen affordable Jurassic fossils for the first time and I would tend to trust the ID's because these folks dug them up. I suspect season collectors will the know the folks I am talking about. I saw a few fossils that were in the price range that we set for ourselves. It is not a lot of money at all but I saw fossils that we CAN get. We can not buy right now. The Judith River Anky and I are in a firmly committed relationship so until that tooth comes home, I am frozen on purchasing for a bit lol I do have a source though and time to start learning about Jurassic dinosaur fossils before I buy any. I know the general profile of what type of dinosaur fossil we will add. It will be a bone, not a tooth, of a sauropod. It will give us a Jurassic dinosaur to fill that blank space in the program plus it would give us some visual flair. Point is...... a little bit of above ground virtual digging can unearth the fossils you want even if they at first seem to expensive to afford. Be patient, be diligent, do your homework, and you can build a pretty awesome dinosaur collection, with out going broke

These past few months I've been working on the weekends as part of a team of amateur and professional paleontologists to prepare a large Barosaurus at the Museum of Ancient Life in Lehi, UT. From October to January I have worked on two large vertebrae from this adult Barosaurus. I believe we won't know the gender until we begin work on the pelvis but not to many of these species have been uncovered so we'll have to compare some other models. It's been a very rewarding journey so far. Here's a couple of pictures of preparation work with a Paleo Tool Air Scribe (forgot the model but one of the larger ones) in October. I'll try to get some before and after photos as we're making tremendous progress on these vertebrae. Behind me is a large 9-ton jacket containing a group of Utahraptors and an herbivore (sand pit). I'm not allowed to post any photos of that but the sickle claws and raptor teeth are a very impressive sight. FYI I realize this isn't as finite or fragile a work as the prep jobs @Malcolmt or @Ptychodus04 do but hey it's a start. Working on the vertebrae's. A near complete vertebrae is on the bottom right. I now wear a mask since the matrix particles are so fine and can get into your lungs and eyes. On the wall above me is a skeletal layout of an adult Barosaurus. The red filled in portions indicate the bones we've already recovered. The pelvis, back femurs, feet, and an assortment of vertebrae. The head is yet to be found and might not be in this jacket. Up close of the vertebrae. Another angle Another angle with some near complete tail sets behind me. If you look closely you'll see some completed vertebrae in the background. Another angle Working from behind the glass so viewers can come see. This is a rewarding, volunteer based opportunity where I feel like I can give back to the community. Occasionally I'll poke my head out to educate those passing by. The youngsters really like this exhibit. Smiling for the camera. Fossil description is on the bottom left. The nine ton sleeve containing the Utahraptors is directly behind me. Another angle This might be my favorite. It shows most of the vertebrae lined up. This photo was taken back in October and I'm amazed at how far it's already come along. Really excited to post some closer photos and will compile a time lapse. A bit fuzzy but another angle Another angle Another angle Another angle (yes I'm wearing my Penn Dixie fleece FYI @DevonianDigger)

A new paper is now online that will shock you: Carpenter, Kenneth. 2018. Maraapunisaurus fragillimus, n.g. (formerly Amphicoelias fragillimus), a basal rebbachisaurid from the Morrison Formation (Upper Jurassic) of Colorado. Geology of the Intermountain West 5:227–244. Despite the missing nature of AMNH 5777, Kenneth Carpenter has erected Maraapunisaurus for Amphicoelias fragillimus and reclassified the taxon as a rebbachisaurid based on comparisons of Cope's figures with illustrations of other rebbachisaurid vertebrae. He's also revised the size estimate for fragillimus to 99 feet because Woodruff and Foster (2014) consider a 190 foot long Maraapunisaurus biologically impossible; even with this revised length, Maraapunisaurus was still a huge sauropod compared to other rebbachisaurids. This new size estimate makes sense because Diplodocus hallorum was initially thought to be 140-150 feet long before later research revised the length of D. hallorum to 110 feet, but also because also because of a lack of research into the biological limits of gigantism in sauropods. Given the discovery of the rather early dicraeosaurid Lingwulong, the rebbachisaurid placement of Maraapunisaurus shortens the ghost lineage of rebbachisaurids created by what is known about early diplodocoid evolution in the Jurassic.