Rocky Mountain dinos

If you had to guess where the holotype for one of the most widely recognized dinosaurs--the species Stegosaurus armatus--was housed, what would you say? The American Museum of Natural History? The Smithsonian? Some Ivy League laboratory? Nope. They are in the tiny Morrison Natural History Museum in Morrison, Colorado. While I actually grew up not 15 miles from the place, I was not aware of it until this past January when, during a week-long trip with my family back to Colorado, I came across it in a tourist magazine. Our five-year-old son, Simon, loves fossils and prehistoric life so I knew we had to take him, and boy was it worthwhile.

The Morrison Museum of Natural History.

The museum lies near Dinosaur Ridge, which is a section of Jurassic and Cretaceous age fossiliferous deposits along the prominent hogbacks, or narrow ridges, that lie just west of Denver at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. The area is famous for the hundreds of dinosaur fossils, including beautifully preserved footprints, that have been unearthed since the late 1870s. It was at Quarry 5 between 1877 and 1879 that the first fossils of the dinosaur genus Stegosaurus were uncovered by Arthur Lakes and his crew. Lakes supervised the recovery of fossils from many other now-famous dinosaurs, including the sauropod Apatosaurus ajax. Most of these specimens were shipped to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University for preparation and description by Othniel Charles Marsh. Some of these specimens were eventually returned to the Morrison Museum for further preparation and display (This blog post from the museum summarizes all of this.)

Vertebrae of specimen YPM 1850, the holotype of Stegosaurus armatus
(Marsh, 1877), on display at the Morrison Natural History Museum.

Long bones of specimen YPM 4676, one of the first Apatosaurus fossils ever
discovered.

We stopped by on a Wednesday morning, and all visitors receive a personal tour from a museum guide. Our guide, Sharon, was wonderful, especially with Simon. The museum's prehistoric reptile displays are very nice, and upstairs there is an excellent exhibit on Cenozoic mammals, including a cool replica of a Colombian mammoth. Sharon also took us into the prep room to visit with the volunteers extracting fossils from the Dinosaur Ridge deposits. That day's volunteers, Amy and Walt, were working on blocks of sandstone. They even handed over their Dremel drills and let Simon take a wack at it. This is a gem of a museum, and I didn't even mind blowing $15 on a cheesy "Ice Age Animals" set for Simon. Money to a good cause.