The Friends of the Florissant Fossil Beds, Inc.

Our first stop in the Garden Park Fossil Area was a view of Edward Drinker Cope’s quarries. Cope (1940-1897) was a well-known and notorious paleontologist, as much for his sometimes vicious rivalry with Othniel Charles Marsh for new dinosaur discoveries, which came to be known as the “Bone Wars.”

Towards the end of the summer, Dr. Herb Meyer took our paleontology interns, Kathy Salas and Eva Lyon, and myself on a tour of part of the Gold Belt Byway. The Gold Belt Byway is a National Scene Byway which winds through spectacular scenery and includes 21 stops of historic or scientific importance, including Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, the Cripple Creek Mining District, the rich dinosaur fossil sites of Garden Park, and an important Ordovician trace fossil site at Indian Springs Ranch.

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Our last two field days were a great example of how scientific fieldwork doesn’t always run smoothly. After last week’s heavy rains, most of the shale was buried in mud, and the exposed shale was extremely fragile.

The second day, we started by looking for a known Antero Formation locality near where we worked on day one, but the rock was very eroded and it was difficult to tell whether the rocks were fossil-bearing. We then returned to our first site and made a second pass. Because of the level of weathering and our limit to the road easement, we worked the site in pieces, primarily on the surface.