DISCOVERY AND EARLY YEARS
No one knows how long the old bones had been weathering out of the hills of what is now Dinosaur National Monument before the first man saw them. Curious Indians, wandering between the upturned ridges of Mesozoic rocks, picked up fragments and carried them off to their camps where they are now found among the arrow points, ax heads, and corn-grinding stones. In 1776, the Spaniard, Father Escalante, passed within sight of today’s dinosaur quarry, not dreaming of the antiquity hidden there. Maj. John Wesley Powell, on his second voyage down the Green River in 1871, recorded the presence of “reptilian remains” in the area, but wrote nothing more about them. Sheepherders, cattlemen, and hunters observed them and were impressed in proportion to their understanding. But, through all the years, the nature of the bones remained a mystery.
EARL DOUGLASS, DISCOVERER OF THE DINOSAUR QUARRY.
Then, in 1893, this mystery was solved. O. A. Peterson, a scientist from the American Museum of Natural History, while conducting field work in the Uinta Basin to the south of the present monument boundaries, discovered bones out-cropping from a recognized fossil-bearing stratum. The stratum was the 140,000,000 year-old Morrison formation. The bones? Peterson reported them as the remains of dinosaurs.
That report was to have an important influence, 15 years later, in directing a fellow paleontologist from the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh to investigate the area. Earl Douglass was the paleontologist’s name. In 1908, he and W. J. Holland, Director of the Carnegie Museum, found themselves in the region of Peterson’s discovery, searching for dinosaur remains. They extended their search to the north and thence along the Morrison hogback that flanks Split Mountain. Bone was found—not much, but enough to bring Douglass back the following summer and in company with George Goodrich, a local resident, to pursue the hunt.
The hunt came to a triumphant climax on August 17, 1909, when—to quote from Douglass’s diary—“At last in the top of the ledge where the softer overlying beds form a divide ... I saw eight of the tail bones of a Brontosaurus {Apatosaurus} in exact position.”