It all added up to an old delta deposit at the mouth of a river, a region of bars where the carcasses of dinosaurs brought down stream accumulated. Settling, the great hulks became buried as they sank into the receptive sand. A number of carcasses multiplied ... and slowly, as flesh and ligament decayed, the bones became mingled, eventually to petrify and remain preserved through the ages.
WORK METHODS
At the quarry, excavating continued summer and winter. The methods employed were those that paleontologists had used for decades. There was no compressed air, no labor-saving devices. The work was done by hand. The crew, which seldom exceeded four men at any one time, became veterans in the art of fossil extraction. The bone was brittle; the encasing sandstone, hard. It required toil, patient direction, and a knowledge of anatomy.
Judiciously placed charges of giant powder shattered the overburden. Hand drills, wedge-and-feather, and crowbar worked the rock away, until the bone layer was encountered. The slow attrition by hammer and chisel accomplished the final delicate separation of the remains from the enclosing matrix. Team-and-scraper and small handcarts removed the rubble that swiftly accumulated in the cut. As the bones were chiseled from the quarry face in large blocks of rock, they were encased in strips of burlap dipped in flour paste. (Later, plaster of Paris supplanted the flour paste.) Then they were lowered by rope onto a mule-drawn skid and “snaked” down the trail into the gulch to await boxing.
REMOVING A LARGE THIGH BONE FROM THE QUARRY WALL DURING THE CARNEGIE MUSEUM OPERATIONS. (COURTESY, A. S. COGGESHALL.)
PLASTERED SPECIMEN REMOVED FROM THE QUARRY DURING THE CARNEGIE MUSEUM OPERATIONS. (COURTESY, A. S. COGGESHALL.)
Transporting the fossils from quarry to railhead was a major undertaking. It required wagon trains—4-horse teams hauling high-wheeled freight wagons over 60 miles of rutted roads to Dragon, Utah. There the precious goods were loaded onto boxcars of the now abandoned narrow gauge Uintah Railway, later to be transhipped to the standard gauge Denver & Rio Grande line at Mack, Colo.