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 (Stop 16). 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.” The pointed hill in the middle of the photo at left is Cope’s Nipple, and the two buttes flanking it are known as the Forts. Orem Lucas collected dinosaur fossils for Cope from near the base of the Nipple. These fossils from the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation (about 155-147 million years old) included the first specimen of Camarasaurus supremus, a short-nosed sauropod.

We then visited the nearby Marsh-Felch Quarry (Stop 15), where the first specimens of several well-known dinosaurs, including Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus were collected, as well as the first Jurassic mammals collected in North America. Marshall and Henry Felch excavated this quarry for Marsh, and their correspondence and other historical information (and lesson plans for teachers) can be found at Hands on the Land’s Marsh-Felch Quarry website.

The Felch brothers completed their excavations in 1888, and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History worked the quarry in 1900 and 1901. Although fossils are generally not visible on the surface, the photo at left shows the cast of a removed dinosaur rib, and there are a few sauropod tracks as well.

After visiting the Marsh-Felch quarry, we stopped by the Bureau of Land Management picnic area across Fourmile Creek from the Cleveland Quarry (Stop 14), worked in 1954 and 1957 by Edwin Delfts for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. This area produced one of the most complete known specimens of the long-necked sauropod Haplocanthus delfsi, as well as fossil eggs that may be from the small dinosaur Othnielia.

We didn’t have time to visit Dinosaur Depot (Stop 11) in Cañon City, where casts of some of the famous Garden Park dinosaurs, a 20-foot-long fossil tree, an active paleontology preparation lab, and other exhibits can be viewed. Instead we continued to Skyline Drive (Stop 12), where dinosaur trackways are preserved in the Early Cretaceous Dakota Sandstone (approximately 100 million years old), which overlies the Morrison.

Most of the Skyline Drive tracks, carefully exposed by volunteers with the Garden Park Paleontology Society, were made by ankylosaurs, a type of armored herbivore. In the image at left, you can see the lone therapod (carnivorous dinosaur) track overlapping one of the ankylosaur tracks.

At right, paleontology intern Eva Lyon looks at the dinosaur trackway. Other fossils found here include tree roots and branches, fossil shrimp burrows, and other trace fossils. For more information about the trackway, visit Dinosaur Depot’s Skyline Drive page. Dinosaur Depot also runs educational tours of the Garden Park Fossil Area and Skyline Drive.

After Skyline Drive, we continued on to the Indian Springs Trace Fossil Site, a much earlier (about 450 million years old) marine trace fossil site.

-Melissa Barton

Photo Credits: Melissa Barton

Geologic Guidebook to the Gold Belt Byway, Colorado, by Thomas W. Henry, Emmett Evanoff, Daniel A. Grenard, Herbert W. Meyer, and David M. Vardiman (Gold Belt Tour Scenic and Historic Byway Association, 2004), is available at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument Visitor Center for $19.95 plus tax.

More Gold Belt Byway Posts:

• Stops 1, 2, 3, 5: Seasonal Training Field Trip (Florissant Area)
• Stops 4, 17, 18: Dome Rock and the Shelf Road
• Stops 19, 20, 21: Indian Springs Trace Fossil Site and Phantom Canyon

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