Page 76 - The Restless Earth Fossils

Finding and excavating Fossils 75

Ironically, years later in 1953, a young Thomas Rich read
All About Dinosaurs, a book written by Andrews. He became
fascinated by the fact that the earliest mammalian ancestors of
human beings lived literally beneath the feet of enormous dino-
saurs and the story of how Andrews had found their bones. Rich
marks the day he read that book as the day he decided to become
a paleontologist. Years later, as a graduate student working in
Australia, he decided to look for evidence of primitive mam-
mals in that country. Instead, he found dinosaur bones. In fact,
he found evidence that dinosaurs had lived in Australia when
that continent still lay relatively close to Antarctica, 100 to 120
million years ago. (Although the world was warmer then, the
dinosaurs [and the forests they lived in] would have experienced
seasonally freezing temperatures and had to adapt to six months
of darkness.)
Rich had the good sense to run with his discovery, too, and
describes his decades-long work in Dinosaurs of Darkness. He also
had the added satisfaction of discovering in some of his quarries,
many years after the initial work began, the very mammal fossils
he had been looking for in the first place.

hot spots For Fossils in the
tWenty-First century
Where have happy accidents turned up in the twenty-first century?
Where are probable hot spots for new discoveries? Old sites still
produce many surprises. John Foster, in his book Jurassic West,
talks about how new dinosaurs are still turning up in exposures of
the Morrison Formation in western Wyoming after more than a
hundred years of exploration there. “The fact that new things can
be learned and new animals found in a formation as extensively
explored as the Morrison only points out how relatively little
we know of what was around at the time and how the animals
lived,” says Foster. Likewise, Montana’s Hell Creek Formation is
still producing dinosaurs like the spiky-headed Dracorex, a kind
of pachycephalosaur; and Dakota, a mummified hadrosaur still
wrapped in a nearly complete envelope of fossilized skin.

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