After a morning of doing little beyond reading in the shade and enjoying a pleasant breeze, we drove north to Utah (actually just a couple of miles away) to the Visitor’s Center in the metropolis of Big Water (population just a tad over 400). There the National Park Service has its headquarters for the paleontological digs on the Grand Staircase Escalante Plateau.
In conjunction, they have a small but incredibly interesting dinosaur museum where two of its resident paleontologists, including Dr. David Gillette, provided a wealth of information about the Age of the Dinosaurs which was his academic specialty.
A few of the surprising facts we learned:
· Much to our surprise, the Colorado River has not channeled its path through the rocks to create the Grand Canyon. Rather, the canyon floor has remained at a relatively constant elevation while the Rocky Mountain plateaus around it have risen … at roughly the same rate as a human’s fingernails grow.
· From the time a partial fossil is discovered, it may take 1-2 years to unearth the entire skeleton and another 4-5 years to clean, assemble and mount the fossil.
· When a new species is unearthed, the person who discovered it does not get to name it.
· On average on the Grand Staircase Escalante Plateau, roughly one new discovery is made each month.
· Dinosaurs with feathers date back almost 200 million years ago.
· There is no such animal as a brontosaurus (which we did know).
On the way back to our campground, we stopped by Lone Rock,
a rectangular monolith rising out of the northwestern end of Lake Powell. After driving past many of the more than 100 RVs camped along the shore
I decided to take whirl at four-wheeling in the soft sand. It was a ball
… until I hit a spot where my Jeep came to an inglorious halt.
I finally managed to slip the transmission into 4-wheel-low and negotiated our way out of the sandy quagmire into which I’d mired our vehicle.
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