A Testimony

Digging the Dinosaur in Utah

By J. Cecil Alter, Meteorologist, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Weather Bureau

Looking back through the ages, some fifteen million years, the geologist sees the plateau lands of Utah at s^a-level, her lakes and hills smiling in summery air; while the paleontologist sees hereabouts an order of gigantic beasts which he has named Dinosauria, striding leisurely and awkwardly over the wellwooded lands, and feeding peacefully along the shore waters of the lakes. Some members of this genealogical group, such as the armored Stegosaurus, weighed only a possible six or eight tons, the lizard-like body of which arched upward fifteen feet from the ground and was some twenty-five feet in total length. This individual had a comparatively short neck and tail, though some of his relatives having similarly unique bodies, were about one-third head and neck, one-third body, and one-third a heavy, tapering tail. Other members of this group, like the Diplodocus and the Brontosaurus, were mastodonian monarchs nearly a hundred feet in length, weighing perhaps twenty or twenty-five tons, or five or six times as much as a large elephant. But while we contemplate the wonderful spectacle in imagination of a herd of these monsters shambling out of the shady forests for a sublime splash in the cooling lake, we feel and hear the thunderous reverberations of their running, which blends, historically at least, with the rumblings of the earth's interior, when the present lands of Utah were lifted to their exalted elevation, and perhaps brought on a change of climate through changes in the earth's orientation, or otherwise, which in turn caused the destruction of the lakes, and the so-called thunder lizards. The Dinosaurs bodies, with the flesh on, undoubtedly floated with the water currents, until they became grounded on the shallow places or near the water's edge, there to be buried in sand and mud which later became the sandstone in which they are found entombed. The land upon which those lizards lived, when found in strata by present-day geologists, is referred to Mesozoic times, or the age of reptiles, while the soil and sands about the remains of the giant animals, has been called Comanchean or Lower Cretaceous sandstone, for stone it has become by reason of great age and pressure due to subsequent earth layers. Most of these

DIGGING THE DINOSAUR IN UTAH 665

strata are hundreds, if not thousands of feet beneath Utah's present surface, but where subsequent uplifts have occurred there is exposed a succession of layers of the earth's crust; and where the deep Jurassic, or the Cretaceous above it, has been brought up, exposing areas where the Dinosaurs congregated or were forced to assemble before or after their destruction, the broad leaves of the book of the past open somewhat reluctantly,

— Left Mineralized fibula of Stegosaurus. Probably the owner of the bone showing in the face of the rock beneath the mans liana's in the view, was about 35 feet long, 15 feet high, being one-third head and neck, onethird body, and one-third tail, the latter being large and tapering, like a lizard's tail. This bone has probably been exposed in the weather for many centuries. — Right View looking east along the sandstone ledge, 10 to 15 feet wide, which carries the fossils. Professor Douglas leans against the north limit of the quarry; many broken bones lie about his feet; not broken in his work, which has been extremely careful, but broken when they lodged in the — quarry ages ago he is now removing the plaster-cast of saiui stone which Nature tried to cover them with. When he gets a good bone, he in turn puts it in another plaster-burlap cast for shipping, as shown just beyond him in the view. The workman is chiseling away the sandstone very carefully from a bone he has found.

and reveal a part of the wonderful story of prehistoric life on earth. The leaves of the book, the earth's strata, though considerably frayed and weather-worn, are nevertheless quite widely open, and their contents most plainly visible, near Split Mountain Canyon, above the majestic Lonetree Bend in the Green River, four or five miles due north of Jensen, Uintah county,