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The Search For Dinosaurs
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Who hasn't been fascinated by their first glimpse of those huge skeletons of giant animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago? And is there anyone who isn't still fascinated by them? I, for one, never get tired of looking at those bony monsters as evidenced by all the pictures of them I posted here, in the article about the Museum of Natural History in New York City. I think it is amazing how many dinosaur bones there are around the world, there certainly is no shortage of them. I would think that the basements of many museums are overflowing with bones, yet we still look for more hoping to discover that rare animal that no one has seen before or that other animal where only a few specimens exist. There is an area which is a National Park called Dinosaur National Monument. In this park you can see dinosaur bones that were partially uncovered and left in place for all to enjoy. The park houses thousands of bones and is 210,000 acres in size. The park stands between Colorado and Utah. Many different types of dinosaur bones are visible. Dinosaurs are very popular and over 450,000 people visit this park annually.
Taking down the skeleton of a dinosaur Picture Source: National Park Service
Photo of a sauropod vertebrae, notice the plaster jacket over it. Once bones are found, it is important that they are removed as quickly as possible. They seem to weather very fast when exposed to the elements. The following picture demonstrates this:
Weathering of the bones The differences in the photographs is striking when you consider that they were only taken thirty days apart. Another park that contains many fossils is Zion National Park where over 120 new areas containing fossils have been located. These fossils sometimes have to be painstakingly dug out of limestone. The following photo shows a fossil embedded in limestone that is being etched out very carefully.
Limestone containing fossil Not all dinosaur finds have to do with finding bones or skeletons. Sometime dinosaur tracks are found in stone as if time had stopped when they walked over the ground.
Dinosaur Tracks The oldest dinosaur types are known from rocks in Argentina and Brazil and are about 230 million years old but older dinosaurs may yet be found, you just never know. It is believed that the last of the dinosaurs died about 65 million years before man appeared on Earth. Dinosaurs were believed to have lived on all continents, this may have been due to the fact that there may have been only one continent, the super continent of Pangea. There have been about 700 species of dinosaurs named but some are based on incomplete evidence, however, it is believed that 700 to 900 are left to be discovered. Scientists do not know the reasons for the dinosaurs growing to such enormous sizes but they guess that the food supply must have been plentiful and that must have played a large role in their growth. The period of dinosaur life on Earth lasted for about 165 million years and may only have ended because of a large meteor crash on Earth which blocked out the sun with dirt and dust thus preventing many plants from growing which starved the dinosaurs. This is not the only theory however. |
