Jurassic park lies underground at Wyoming Dino Centre
IT WAS about an hour into our dig under the blazing Wyoming sun that my six-year- old, Henry, cried out, “I found one!”
The geologist working alongside him, Angela Reddick, cocked her head, raised her eyebrows and stepped off her small pad to inch in for a closer look. I was sceptical. Already, four-year- old Silas and I, working nearby, had found scores of “bones,” only to hear the disappointing verdict that they were rocks.
We were digging in the midst of the Morrison Formation, a sedimentary rock sequence that’s among the most fertile sources of dinosaur fossils in North America. As we chipped away at the soft rock and earthen surface with dull oyster knives and trowels, sweat dripped down our necks. Beyond our mesh shade structure, the landscape rolled off into the distance, a sea of sage and red- dirt hills.
You would think that the odds were against us, an inexperienced trio with only one truly focused and committed member ( Henry). But Reddick was examining his discovery with diligence. She ran her hand over the sleek, black material that Henry had partially unearthed and squinted. The three of us watched, breathless.
“Congratulations, Henry,” she said. “You found yourself a dinosaur bone.”
Sweeter words have never been spoken to a first- grader. Henry beamed as she created a small, white label to mark the bone, which she said was massive. There was no way we would dig it out in its entirety, she told us. Rather, we’d leave it for other teams to slowly liberate and then, when it was ready, professionals would wrap it in a plaster cast and transport it to the Wyoming Dinosaur Centre’s laboratory, where it would be cleaned and catalogued.
Henry’s satisfaction was contagious, and we all were jolted with newfound energy. Silas exuberantly congratulated his big brother and then, in his excitement, tried to lift the bucket into which we had been tossing big rocks we pulled from the dig site.
Reddick immediately switched from lecturing scientist to astute guide and protector - a transformation she did effortlessly and frequently on the day we spent together - and relieved him of the heavy load. She dumped it away from the quarry and then returned to deliver high-fives all around. It was enough encouragement to keep us baking in the midmorning June heat of Central Wyoming for another hour.
Last spring, a friend from Fairbanks, Alaska, flew her family of five to Utah, rented an R.V. and set out on a western dinosaur tour that included Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and the Dakotas. Until she sent me an enthusiastic email raving about their stop in Thermopolis, I couldn’t have found the Wyoming town on a map. But it is home to the Wyoming Dinosaur Centre, where kids and adults alike can join in authentic excavations and then get firsthand experience in a high-tech lab before touring the centre’s impressive museum. There they’ll see “Jimbo,” a supersaurus, one of the largest dinosaurs ever mounted, and “Stan,” a 35-foot Tyrannosaurus rex, charging a triceratops. The museum has more than 30 mounted skeletons and hundreds of displays and dioramas.
In her email, my friend encouraged me to head north from my Colorado home, post haste, and to plant my kids in the shoes of a paleontologist for a day. What could be more interesting, more educational, more hands- on than excavating, cleaning and studying dinosaur bones in the field?
“You’re in the quarry, with the tools, hacking away at the rock,” my friend wrote. “It’s worth every penny. I would do it again in a heartbeat.” She ended her missive with a warning to make sure that the kids knew we wouldn’t be digging for a T. rex; the bones buried near Thermopolis come from sauropods.
I looked “sauropods” up in the dog- eared pages of Henry’s dino encyclopedia and learned that the name means “lizardfooted” and that this class of dinosaurs lived in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, roughly 65 million years to 150 million years ago. They’re known for having extremely long necks, long tails and small heads. Oh yeah - they were also the largest animals to have ever lived on land. That sounded pretty cool.
What sounded even better was the chance to encounter the bones in the real world, far from the natural history museums where we could look at but not touch those compelling skeletons. But the Dig for a Day price was steep - US$ 150 ( RM630) for me and US$ 100 for each of the boys - and I wanted to make sure this would be a worthwhile endeavor before shelling out US$ 350 for a one- day activity. I needn’t have worried. When I asked if they wanted to drive for eight hours into Wyoming to dig
A privately owned facility, the Wyoming Dinosaur Centre opened in 1995. It was the brainchild of a German-born, Switzerlandbased veterinarian and amateur fossil collector, Burkhard Pohl, who vacationed in Wyoming in 1993.
for dinosaur bones, the answer came quickly and unanimous: Absolutely!
Naturally. Ever since they could express opinions, Henry and Silas have clamoured for books about dinosaurs. They’ve corrected me when I’ve mistaken arthropods for sauropods (rookie mistake). They wear dinosaur-decorated clothes, and their flipflops leave archaeopteryx tracks in their wake. One sleeps with a stuffed triceratops, the other with a plush T. rex.
Two weeks later, we downloaded Disney’s “The Good Dinosaur” (the scientists at the Wyoming Dinosaur Centre were consultants on the 2015 animated film, which takes place in what is modern- day Wyoming) onto the iPad and hit the road.
A privately owned facility, the Wyoming Dinosaur Centre opened in 1995. It was the brainchild of a German-born, Switzerland-based veterinarian and amateur fossil collector, Burkhard Pohl, who vacationed in Wyoming in 1993.
During his trip, Pohl fell in love with Thermopolis, which in addition to being a hub of oil and gas production is renowned for its elk hunting, fishing and hot springs.
In that auspicious visit, Pohl and friends also discovered dinosaur bones on the ranch that he would subsequently buy and transform into the Wyoming Dinosaur Centre. — WPBloomberg