Dinosaur Ridge

This morning A took me to see Dinosaur Ridge, at one of the hogback outcrops west of Denver.

Allosaurus terrorising local traffic

It was a great place to see the geology in action – I could imagine how the Denver region was once at the bottom of a sea, and how over the years sedimentary layers built up to a depth of two miles thick (!!!!!), and then the whole continent rose until it was a mile above sea level, and then 70 million years ago the Rockies began to grow, buckling and pushing the two-mile-deep layers up to the surface. There was even an older version of the Rockies, 280 million years ago, which were eroded down to nothing before the present Rockies even appeared.

 

The scale of time and space involved makes my brain hurt. I’m used to dealing with centuries, or at best millenia. I can’t deal with this crap.

The hogback on the right has been pushed up at an angle, the plain on the left is a two-mile deep layer of sediment

What’s special about this outcrop is that it preserves amazing dinosaur fossils and footprints in ancient shores and stream beds. Obviously the layers were once horizontal, but they’ve been pushed up at an angle, so you can get a really clear view of the whole surface.

An ancient stream bed

Iguanadon footprints

Fossiled burrows of little river worm things

Even the ripples on the river bed have been fossilised!

Ancient sedimentary layers

The white layer is formed of crystals from volcanic ash over 100 million years ago

I think this is a dinosaur bone

It was a pleasant, sunny walk up the Dinosaur Trail, stopping at fossil displays while cyclists whizzed past. Back down to the friendly visitor centre, I got chatting with one of the gift shop attendants.

SHIT A DINOSAUR oh no wait it's only a model

She asked if I knew anything about geology, so I said I was an archaeologist by training. She got excited and called over one of her colleagues, who had just been on a two-month archaeological dig in Africa, so we had a chat about archaeology. I was also telling the lady how much I loved the Denver climate (dry heat! mountain trails! no stupid oceans and beaches!). She asked if I would like to live here. I said yes, but then added glumly that there wasn’t much call for medieval historians in Colorado.

Really, who would not want to live here?

Guess I should have been a paleontologist instead.