Dinosaurs in Colorado?

By Tiffany Amber Stockton

Last month, I wrote about one of Colorado's claims to fame in hosting the world's first rodeo (even though other states also make that claim). It is documented and proven for Deer Trail, though. If you missed that post, you can read it here: https://www.hhhistory.com/2020/07/the-worlds-first-rodeo.html.

Today, we're going to go way back in time to when dinosaurs roamed the earth...and did so in Colorado.

DINOSAURS in COLORADO

When you read about the town of Morrison, Colorado, you will almost always see the Red Rocks Ampitheatre mentioned right alongside it. This iconic natural rock formation is host to some very famous music concerts, performances, and even groups of extreme exercise fans.

However, there there was a time when the small mountain community was known less for music and more as a hotbed for dinosaur fossils. The town’s most famous discovery happened in 1877, less than a full year after Colorado achieved statehood. Professor and geologist Arthur Lakes discovered large dinosaur bones along the Dakota Hogback, and he asked dinosaur specialist Othniel Marsh to hire him so he could search for more.

For the next two years, Marsh directed Lakes’ search. The time spent digging and exploring that area is what produced the world’s first glimpses at Stegosaurus and Apatosaurus (or Brontosaurus) fossils. It's amazing to think these gigantic creatures once walked along the foot of the Rocky Mountains! Sadly, when Lakes concluded his research, the digging site went untouched and abandoned for 123 years. Experts resumed the search again in 2002, and today, the site is known as Dinosaur Ridge. It's a National Landmark and fascinating place to visit for anyone with a love of natural history.

In that same vein, the mascot for the Colorado Rockies baseball team is a triceratops named Dinger. Why? Because during the excavation of Coors Field in 1994, a handful of dinosaur fossils were found at the site. The marketing team for the Rockies created a much bigger spin on the truth than what actually happened, even going so far as to have the mascot be "hatched from an egg." That doesn't diminish the reality of the find, though. If you go to the basement of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, you will find a box containing a 4-inch rib bone and other fragments.

This is only one of many dinosaur stories here in Colorado. As a young girl, I was fascinated by dinosaurs and wrote several reports on them, including an extra credit assignment that featured a diorama and details of the topography common in areas where dinosaurs walked. Imagine my surprise when I move to Colorado and discover that topography is right here!

NOW IT'S YOUR TURN:

* Have you ever held a real fossil?

* Where is your favorite place to go see dinosaur fossils or skeletons?

* Do you have a fascination for dinosaurs? What is your favorite, and why?

* What topics would you like to see covered in future posts?

Answer any or all of the following, or leave any comment or question you'd like below. Come back on the 9th of September for my next appearance.

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BIO

Tiffany Amber Stockton has been crafting and embellishing stories since childhood, when she was accused of having a very active imagination and cited with talking entirely too much. Today, she has honed those childhood skills to become an award-winning and best-selling author and speaker who is also an advocate for literacy as an educational consultant with Usborne Books. She loves to share life-changing products and ideas with others to help better their lives.

She lives with her husband and fellow author, Stuart Vaughn Stockton, along with their two children and two dogs in Colorado. She has sold twenty (23) books so far and is represented by Tamela Hancock Murray of the Steve Laube Agency. You can find her on Facebook and GoodReads.

More than Fruits and Vegetables in Colorado’s Garden Park

It wasn’t gold in “them thar hills” that had university professors waging war near Cañon City, Colorado, in the late 1800s. Very little if any gold was found in the immediate area, but paleontologists battled over something they considered more valuable. Something that lay within the greenish-tinted sedimentary soil along ancient creek beds in the Garden Park area north of town.

The Marsh-Felch Quarry in Garden Park north of Canon City, CO.

Garden Park fossil discoveries of the 1870s and 1880s led to the famous “Bone Wars” between rival paleontologists, O.C. Marsh and E.D. Cope. Local rancher, Marshall P. Felch, spent years working and mapping the dig sites on behalf of Marsh for Yale University.

Early discoveries included the first complete skeleton of Allosaurus. The area continued to provide some of the most well-preserved Jurassic-period remains, and in 1886, Garden Park gave up its first magnificent stegosaurus skeleton.

However, long before professors sparred over the finds, local Ute tribes and early settlers had already come across the prehistoric bones. A few early merchandisers even sold fossils as souvenirs and oddities in curio shops.

I mention a curio shop in one of my three Cañon City historical novels, Romancing the Widow, set in 1888 during the height of the Bone Wars. Young widow Martha Stanton compares her life to the dusty fossil remains found in Garden Park, and even participates in some of the digs.

In the real world roughly fifty years later, another fossilized stegosaurus was discovered in 1937 by local high school teacher and Geology Club officer, Carl Kessler. That 23-foot long treasure stands today in Denver’s Museum of Nature and Science. Kessler’s find later inspired a student-driven campaign that resulted in the declaration of the stegosaurus as the Colorado State Fossil in 1982.

One of several education signage markers along the Marsh-Felch Quarry Trail.

Ten years later, that declaration was further solidified when the world’s most complete stegosaurus skeleton was excavated from the Garden Park area, skull included, and air-lifted via Chinook helicopter for further study and preservation.

Late-Jurassic fossils and flora from Garden Park are exhibited in major museums today such as those in New York City, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Explorations continue by such entities as the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. In 1972, the area was placed on the National Natural Landmark registry by the National Park Service.

Tourists can visit the real site where my fictional heroine, Martha, explored, today known as the Marsh-Felch Quarry. The quarry is located off Garden Park Road (Red Canyon Road) and can be accessed via a self-guided, well-marked, quarter-mile hiking trail with informative exhibits along the path.

Colorful bluffs and unusual land forms around Cañon City have harbored prehistoric secrets for thousands of years, some of which have been unearthed as late as the 21st Century. Skyline Drive west of town offers not only a breathtaking vista of the surrounding area, but dinosaur footprints of an Ankylosaurus embedded in the jutting rock, discovered in 2001.

Can you see the four Ankylosaurus footprints in this photo?

A few miles west of there, up U.S. Highway 50, visitors can enjoy a stop at the Royal Gorge Dinosaur Experience with kid-friendly activities and spectacular exhibits.

Today, the Garden Park area provides livestock feed with pastures for grazing and hay fields for storing feed through the winter. In the late 1800s, fruits and vegetables grown in the park-like country above the fossil beds supplied food for the gold mining towns of Victor and Cripple Creek, roughly twenty miles up the road.

That road, however, changes names three times, from Garden Park, to Red Canyon, to Shelf Road. Adventurous types who continue driving north will discover that the final name was applied with good reason to the narrow, one-lane shelf that cuts into the gold country. Do not try it in a sports car or a vehicle pulling a trailer. Instead, drive west through Cañon City on U.S. Highway 50 until you reach Highway 9. It’s a longer, safer (and just as scenic) way to get to gold country!

Four Mile Creek in Garden Park during the fall.

All photographic images by the author.

For more on Colorado’s historic Garden Park area, visit http://www.handsontheland.org/garden-park/. Better yet, come see for yourself.

Young widow Martha Stanton returns to her parents’ parsonage in Cañon City, bereft of love and deprived of hope. As dry and lifeless as the fossils she once collected during the city’s infamous “bone wars,” she resigns herself to a dull existence—until she crosses paths with an old flame and a darkly mysterious stranger.

Colorado Ranger Haskell Jacobs is on a mission. And the flame-haired beauty in black who steps off the train isn’t what he’s looking for. Or is she? As drawn as he is to her fiery spirit, Haskell learns that she has connections to the horse thief he’s hunting. Entanglement with a preacher’s daughter is the last thing he needs—and the one thing he can’t avoid.

Bestselling author and winner of the Will Rogers Gold Medallion for Inspirational Western Fiction, Davalynn Spencer writes heart-tugging romance with a Western flair, both contemporary and historical. Connect with her at www.davalynnspencer.com