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HILLARY RICHARD
NYT Syndicate
On a blisteringly hot June day in the North Dakota, there are very few signs of life outside of birds, snakes and wandering livestock. The landscape is tall, stark and punishing, with loose rocks to trip you and serrated cliffs to cut you when you fall. Conical peaks rise from the ground, each striated layer full of potential discovery.
This was once a land of savannas and plains, with rivers and lakes. Unrecognizable creatures ” with disproportionate limbs, spikes, shells, horns, unfathomable teeth ” roamed freely, feeding on the tall grass and, oftentimes, one another.
Last summer, I was perched precariously on a steep, uncomfortably jagged mountain ledge that poked sharply even through my kneepads, the flat head of my rock hammer poised over a sharp chisel. The harsh summer sun cast a shadow over my tools, which were anchored in a crevice only millimetres deep. I paused.
"How old did you say this is?" I asked.
"That? Around 34 million years," Clint Boyd, a palaeontologist who was with me, answered casually.
In what is now called the Badlands, an area so named because nothing much grows there, rhinos once roamed. Lakes and rivers in what is now a bone-dry landscape once sustained a population of large land tortoises. Cinematic favourites like Triceratops, duck-billed dinosaurs and Tyrannosaurus rex traversed North Dakota.
The state and its fossils have a unique, constantly evolving relationship, thanks in part to modern-day discoveries made on public digs. Die-hard dinosaur fans return each year to assist palaeontologists, but the public digs are not well-known outside the world of fossil enthusiasts.
The bones I was to excavate last June were hidden, except for 2 inches of a rib sticking out of the mountain. The thin, khaki-clad palaeontologist assured me that rhinos were very common in this area and that I wouldn't ruin anything beyond repair. I swung the hammer onto the head of the chisel, sending a huge crack through stone that had been impossible to chip with just a trowel. With a second hit at a 45-degree angle, a chunk flew off, and I could see the rhinoceros' rib bone, which had settled millions of years ago into the landscape outside Dickinson, due west of Bismarck, the state capital.
A few peaks and valleys over, Becky Barnes, another palaeontologist, clad in jeans and one of her many humorous dinosaur-theme T-shirts, bent over a fossilised tortoise shell, her long braid poking out beneath a tan, wide-brimmed hat. She nicknamed the shell Bruce's tortoise in her field notebook. Bruce was neither an early explorer nor a notable scientist. Bruce ” like me ” was just your typical volunteer on a dig in western North Dakota. He'd happened to chip into a mountain and found a stylemys (similar in appearance to an outsized Gal'e1pagos tortoise), which lived about the same time as my rhino.
In the Eocene Epoch, which lasted roughly from 55 million to 34 million years ago, this area looked similar to the African habitats where rhinos live. This landscape is anything but flat. Walking through the mountains required good balance and paying attention to each step. Only by cracking the surface of these inhospitable rocks could you begin to discover the curious world of wildlife that once roamed here.
There are a number of dig sites, like the one outside Dickinson, where volunteers are guaranteed to uncover fossils. The three palaeontologists whom I had met, Boyd, Barnes and Jeff Person, also discovered several small creatures they had never seen before at this site, mainly types of fish and oreodonts ("walking food," as Barnes calls them, referring to their place on the food chain).
This year's public digs have been scaled back to four from five in 2016, because of budget cuts. The Bismarck area dig (July 24-28) is the only one that focuses exclusively on dinosaurs. At Pembina Gorge (August 8-12), volunteers can dig up sea life from 80 million years ago, like giant squid and mosasaurs (marine reptiles). The Medora dig (July 13-16), near Theodore Roosevelt National Park, uncovers swamp creatures from 55 million to 60 million years ago. The Dickinson dig (June 26-30) has the youngest mammal fossils, at 30 million to 40 million years old. Volunteers can join for one day or stay the entire five days.
At 7:30 on the morning of the Dickinson dig, I met up with the palaeontologists in the parking lot of the Heritage Center and State Museum in Bismarck, off a highway dotted with large chain stores and hotels. A group email had informed volunteers about what to wear (closed-toe shoes, long pants, a brimmed hat), what to bring (plenty of water), what not to bring (iPods and headphones) and what to watch for (rattlesnakes, prickly pear cactus). Our car convoy headed west on Interstate 94 following their truck, which stood out from the sea of other trucks on the highway thanks to its trailer hauling a black fat-wheeled utility task vehicle.
The landscape changed as soon as the sprawl of big-box chain stores and Bismarck highways disappeared in the rearview mirror. The nearly 100-mile drive dispelled any myth that North Dakota is flat. As I followed the convoy in my rental car, we passed rolling hills with emerald green grass, farmhouses dotting acres of fields and wild, rocky landscapes. Tall signs advertising the Medora Musical, a popular western cabaret show, and the Enchanted Highway, a scenic route dotted with large sculptures, punctuated a big sky with swift-moving clouds. The convoy ” eight adults including a mother with an adolescent boy ” turned off the highway and ventured into farmland, kicking up rocks and dust on unmarked roads before parking in a green field that slanted upward. We outfitted ourselves with picks, brushes, awls, trowels and collection vials.
We hiked 15 minutes through prairie pastures before arriving at our test site, a flat and dry former pond, where the palaeontologists could observe our techniques as we scoured the ground inch by inch in search of tiny fossils, which initially appeared similar to rocks. The palaeontologists held unabashedly nerdy debates over whether dinosaurs had feathers between effortless explanations of terminology and time periods for the beginners in the group. Their well of patience and enthusiasm seemed endless, examining countless pieces of rock the volunteers mistakenly presented as fossils.
For those familiar with North Dakota history, dinosaurs are just a part of life. Museums across the state present fossils that could easily join a collection in the American Museum of Natural History. The Dickinson Museum Center, for example, has 11 full-scale skeletons and an impeccable Triceratops skull, looming large over display cases of beautiful geodes, which seemed to garner more attention from local visitors.
"We have so many incredible dinosaur resources in the state," said Kim Schmidt, of the North Dakota Department of Commerce's Tourism Division,"that I think sometimes people forget this is unusual, that you can't find what we have everywhere."
North Dakota is part of the Hell Creek Formation, a set of rocks from a geological period that records the very last slice of time before the dinosaurs went extinct. This was"the last gasp" for dinosaurs. For palaeontologists, digging around the state offers a more comprehensive twist. It has the Hell Creek Formation layer of ground, the extinction layer and a thick Paleocene layer on top. This means that they can study the last generation of dinosaurs as well as the flora and fauna that survived them. By holding digs across the state, palaeontologists can gain insight into an intriguing and mysterious window in time.
As Boyd put it:"Having a nice complete section means we can look at exactly what happens to the mammals, the turtles, the fish, the plants. In North Dakota, you can study the extinction and what that did to the entire fauna better than you can in a lot of places in the country."
Deep down ” very deep down, hundreds of feet in some cases ” there are dinosaurs almost everywhere. Digs in the southwest and south central part of the state, Rhame, Bowman, Marmath and areas south of Bismarck, frequently turn up dinosaur fossils. A good fossil is one that was buried quickly by the elements, avoiding predators and scavengers. North Dakota had a large delta during the Hell Creek Formation, which occurred roughly 65.5 million years ago. Rain and sediment washed carcasses from shorelines into moving water, which buried them and effectively preserved them for eternity.
The public digs attract all kinds of people. There's a core group of dedicated volunteers who sign up each summer, driving from the far reaches of neighbouring states to work on bones that will one day go on display in a North Dakota museum. Then there are summer road trippers, seeking a unique experience on their way to Yellowstone. There are tourists looking for a day activity from Bismarck or Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Medora and, on occasion, travellers from abroad. There are dinosaur-obsessed children, of course, but an equal number of dinosaur-obsessed parents like the mother with her son in our convoy. Then there was me, the East Coast journalist, with a penchant for seeking new adventures in remote locations.
At the end of the day, I left the dig dusty, blistered, sunburned, scraped and exhausted, but thrilled with everything I had seen and learned. I had a greater appreciation of our fleeting place in history, our smallness on this Earth and how much there is left to discover about the places we think we know.
If you go
Fossil digs are held in June, July and August. Booking a spot is an easy, casual experience ” you can call Mindy Austin at the North Dakota Geological Survey directly at 701-328-8015 or email [email protected]. Information on fossil digs can be found on the Geological Survey website at dmr.nd.gov/ndfossil/digs.
