Dinosaur

I wrote this 5 years ago.

Driving from Salt Lake City to Denver took me down one of the loneliest roads I have ever seen. In one stretch, it must have been over 20 minutes without seeing another car.

By the time I got to the town of Dinosaur, Colorado, I was ready for a break. I had plenty of gas and I wasn’t hungry or thirsty, but I needed to stretch my legs. It was then that I saw a wooden shack by the side of the road with a large sign that read “FOSSILS”. I thought it would be great to bring home a fossil as a present for my 10-year-old daughter. So I pulled into the empty gravel parking lot, parked my rented Ford Taurus, and went inside.

The shop was very dirty and cluttered and filled with an amazing variety of fossils of every kind I could imagine. Some were polished and quite beautiful. Many were several hundred dollars. Some were well over a thousand.

I was enthralled. I had to look at every one of them and there were so many. I must have been browsing for over ten minutes when I heard, “Can I help you find something?”

The old man behind the counter bore a striking resemblance to the actor Wilfred Brimley. He wore a pair of overalls and was even more covered with dirt than his store. He looked like he had come from an excavation he had going just outside the back door.

“Yes, thank you. I am looking for a fossil for my daughter’s rock collection.”

“How much are you looking to spend?” He asked.

“I just want to spend around $5.”

A brief look of disappointment flashed across the old man’s face. Then he smiled and said, “Trilobites! Kids love trilobites.”

He handed me a small black trilobite. It was exactly $5. It was very cool.

“Thank you. This is perfect. My daughter will love it.” I said.

“Have you been up to see the monument?” The old man inquired.

I knew he was referring to Dinosaur National Monument. I had seen the signs on the highway. The entrance was about 6 miles east of town. I really had no desire.

“No. I wasn’t planning to see it. I am just on my way from Salt Lake City to Oklahoma. I’m staying in Denver tonight.”

The old man sighed.

“So, let me get this straight. You are in too much of a hurry to drive twenty miles out of your way to see something that people come all the way from Jay-PAN to see.”

I laughed. “Well, since you put it that way, I guess I’ll go see the monument. Is it really that impressive?”

“You’ll have to decide for yourself. There sure are a lot of dinosaurs up there.”

I thanked the man again and left. Twenty minutes later, I was parking at the Dinosaur Quarry Visitors Center at Dinosaur National Monument.

In 1909, Earl Douglass, a paleontologist who worked for the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh, discovered this place. He was looking for a few dinosaur bones to ship to his museum. What he found instead were thousands of them. By 1915, president Woodrow Wilson had heard about the great dinosaur quarry that Douglass had started and he declared it Dinosaur National Monument.

As I walked out of the bright sunlight and into the glass building that protects the quarry from the elements, my eyes had to adjust for a moment before I could see anything. Slowly the exhibit came into view, and as it did I was overcome with awe. I stood on a walkway about three stories above the ground facing a huge rock wall. Clearly imbedded all over this rock wall were the fossilized bones of hundreds of dinosaurs.

I had seen dinosaur skeletons made to look fearsome in a museum gallery, but this was entirely different. The bones of these animals were in their natural state; arranged exactly as they were when their bodies were buried in a riverbed, 150 million years ago. The image did not even remotely inspire fear. A large pile of dead animals inspires sadness.

As I looked at the quarry wall, I was reminded of a scene from years before. When I was 16, my father took me fishing in Alaska. It was in the month of August, and the King Salmon had already finished spawning, and they were dying. I was walking along a river and I saw the bloated carcasses of King Salmon everywhere. I remembered how their bodies would collect in pockets of still water.

The rock wall of the quarry looked just like that, only instead of King Salmon bodies, I was mostly looking at the remains of brontosaurs - sauropods of the late Jurassic period. These animals were 75 feet long. When they were alive, they each weighed 13 tons.

Just what killed all of these animals? Did they die at different times and at different places along the river, but water currents kept depositing bodies at this one spot? Or did they all die on the same day, perhaps all drowning in a flash flood? For some reason I think that these animals all died together. As I looked at the wall of rock at Dinosaur Quarry, I felt almost like I was witnessing a mass drowning death in a river so very long ago.

And then I thought about the time span that separates me from that day. 150 million years. One hundred fifty-years seems like a long time to me, but 150 MILLION years? That is beyond comprehension.

Or is it? My memory goes back 38 years. With that memory, I can maybe comprehend a century. Maybe. On the other hand, the briefest time interval I am familiar with is one second. What if I had a time machine that would go back in time at the rate of one century for every second? Think about it. My entire life would pass by in the time it takes for my heart to beat one beat, during a jog. In 20 seconds, I would be back to the time of Christ. After a minute, I would be well beyond recorded history. How long then, at this pace, would it take for me to get back to the day where the bodies of these giant animals came to their final resting place at the bottom of a nameless river? I did the math. The answer is 17 days, 8 hours, and 40 minutes. Unlike H.G. Well’s famous time machine, mine better have plenty of provisions and a bathroom.

The Earth was a very different place when these animals died. It spun faster on its axis; the days were only 23 hours long. The moon was even closer. It appeared much larger in the sky, and months were a week shorter than they are now. If I were to step out of my time machine after my 17-day journey, the plants, the animals, everything would seem alien to me. I might not recognize the Earth of the late Jurassic period to be my home planet at all.

And yet, I was there. I was a part of that world. Virtually every atom in my body was here on Earth 150 million years ago. The water that makes up most of me was in the sea, or in the air, or in a lake, or in the river that claimed the bodies of these noble brontosaurs. Some of me may have actually been part of one of the brontosaurs now entombed on the side of that mountain in Utah.

I had the strange sense of awakening a long forgotten memory. I could see the Sun hanging low over the misty forest, and I saw its light reflecting in the water of a vast winding river. I could see the brontosaurs grazing on the trees near the river banks. Then suddenly the water came crashing down on them. Blocked by the dense forest, there was no way to escape the flood. I could hear their cries of anguish. The brontosaurs struggled to regain their footing, but the water was too strong. They were pulled down into the blackness.

Their bodies lay buried for so long that thousands of feet of rock and dirt was eventually deposited above. The crushing weight and heat forced all the water from the soft riverbed and hardened it into solid rock. Then, the continent buckled. The land shattered at the very place where the riverbed once was. The tomb of these dinosaurs was lifted into the sky. Their fossilized bones eventually saw sunlight again. The stone that was the riverbed in which they were buried was now the very top of a mountain peak in the Rockies.

For the last two thousand years many Christians have been expecting the world to come to an end fairly soon. As I stood looking at the dinosaurs of Dinosaur National Monument, I knew that the world will be here for a very long time. It will be here 150 million years from now. The sun will still be shining. The moon will be smaller in the sky. And I will still be here, the same way I was here the day those dinosaurs drowned.

I got back in my car and headed home. I was no longer in a hurry.