My last postcards ended day three of my journey when I arrived in Fruita, Colorado. I started the next day with writing for The Planet in the room of my typical American Motel and then decided to slow down my planned schedule to explore the dinosaurs' legacy in the region.
I started in the Fruita dinosaur museum, part of the diamond-shaped area in northwest Colorado where many fossils have been found. If I had had two or three extra days, I would have stayed here to explore more sites. However, I decided to take half a day to chase Dinos this time, but I added to my bucket list the route that is described here:
"Some of the world's most significant dinosaur fossil quarries and museums are clustered along this route, in the midst of a forbidding but stunningly beautiful landscape. The earth, fractured and stained, coughs up a rare collection of treasures. Ancient stone rises to the surface after eons underground; skeletons buried 100 million years ago now bleach in the desert sun. The byway traverses high mountains and barren plateaus, with stops at two national parks, two national monuments, and two great rivers of the West(the Colorado and Green). This dramatic maze of rocks and bones defies the imagination."
I followed only a small part of the route. Starting in the museum I just mentioned. I was impressed by these enormous and rather scary animals, and when one of the visiting schoolchildren pressed a button, the deafening roar of a Diplodocus didn't help to make me feel at ease.
But then I befriended a real-scale replica of Tyrannosaurus Rex, and we both smiled at the camera for a selfie.
This is the right forelimb of a Brachiosaurus. For easy reference, it's a bit of the giraffe of his time, eating the tree tops. It lived in what we now call the U.S. about 154 to 150 million years ago. The species was discovered by the American paleontologist Elmer Riggs in 1903, based on fossils he found very close to where the Museum of Fruita is now located, near the Colorado River in Western Colorado. Riggs named the dinosaur Brachiosaurus altithorax, referring to "arm lizard" in reference to its proportionately long arms.
After I left the museum (it's small, and if you are not a dino-fanatic, you've seen the highlights in 20 minutes), I drove one or two minutes to the site where Riggs had found some of his most famous fossils, but I soon gave up my hike in the powerful winds on the hill.
I especially enjoyed another site, further to the west along Highway 70, at exit 2, just before the Utah border. There I saw for the first time dinosaur fossils in nature, which felt quite different from seeing them in a museum.
As you can see, it was very windy there too. And deserted, I was the only one at the site during the one or two hours I spent there.
I'll show two examples. Here you can see the vertebrae from the back of a juvenile Diplodocus, well preserved in a sandstone ledge. The bones are dark-brown in color and arched up and back in a typical death pose, thought to be caused by the drying and shortening of muscles and ligaments of the back following death. Adult specimens of Diplodocus attained nearly 27 meters, making it one of the longest dinosaurs.
And this is a Camarasaurus, an 18 meters long, plant-eating sauropod dinosaur species. The front half of a skeleton is preserved in sandstone (I'm quoting here what I learned that morning). Soon after its death, this individual was buried in the sands of an ancient river channel, which was preserved as a sandstone ledge. Look carefully, and you can see the grey-colored X-shaped remnants of the neck vertebrae.
By this time, I had lost count of how many times I had crossed the Colorado River. Here it is again, the leitmotiv of my journey.
And soon after that, I crossed the border from Colorado into Utah:
Where the route first looked like this, a long, empty highway and the best songs of Bruce Springsteen to keep me company.
I took this photo horizontally, but the horizon itself is not horizontal. This a problem Dutch photographers are not trained to deal with in our flat country.
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Great selfie, Alexander.
I have never seen a Dinosaur so smitten (-:
You probably made it to Flagstaff by now and Grand Canyon National Park. I wonder how much water and flow loss you can see? The weather forecast looks good.
🌻🐓 and, ah, the chicken is still our modern day living Dinosaur, today!
Excellent timing on that newsletter. I had just made coffee and was about to start writing.
You and your dino buddy look really happy in that picture. Have bookmarked that Dinosaur Diamond route. That sounds like I'd really enjoy it. Wow, those dinosaur fossils look amazing. Must have been tough to leave. The US is perfect for road trips - especially the West. Makes me want to go back. Those long empty highways (we don't have those in Switzerland - even if they are empty, they are NEVER straight for very long), with good music and nice photo ops. I had the opposite problem in the Netherlands - taking pictures of the flat countryside is not as easy as it sounds. Your comment made me smile. Thank you for taking us along on your trip.