FOSSIL FUELS NEW DISCOVERY

0 Comments | Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), May 25, 2008 | by BILL REED --

Colorado Springs has a dinosaur to call its own, a beast that's never been found anywhere else in the world.

Scientists planned to announce Saturday at Garden of the Gods that century-old assumptions about a dinosaur skull found in the park in the late 1800s are wrong. The fossils don't belong to the type of dinosaur -- the camptosaurus -- that early bone hunters thought it did.

It seems the skull fragments belong to a dino that's new to science, a conclusion that sent ripples through the rockin' world of paleontology. The scientist who made the discovery -- Ken Carpenter, vertebrate paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science - - named the new creature Theiophytalia kerri, which loosely translates to "belonging to the Garden of the Gods."

"I think it's fun that Garden of the Gods has its very own dinosaur," said Bonnie Frum, director of the Garden of the Gods Visitor and Nature Center, where a replica of the skull is on display.

100 million years ago ...

The world "Theio" knew was very different from what we see today at Garden of the Gods.

The dino lived about 125 million to 100 million years ago, and probably spent most of his time doing what he did best -- tearing leaves off the vegetation with his beaklike mouth and then grinding them down with his back teeth. The 25- to 30-foot-long dinosaur stood on its hind legs most of the time, so it could reach high into trees, with a tail that stuck straight out rather than dragging on the ground.

The beast lived on the edge of the massive inland sea that was creeping south over North America and turned this area into a warm, lush shoreline. The shallow sea nearby teemed with marine life, including sharks, fish, clams and reptiles such as plesiosaurs, while early birds lived along the shores and fished in the waters. Hike around the ridges on the eastern edges of Garden of the Gods and you will see shells and marine fossils embedded in the rock layers.

The ancestral Rockies had already given way to the forces of erosion, and the second set of Rockies hadn't yet risen from the ground, so Theio would have roamed relatively flat vistas with a herd of a dozen or more. Small, carnivorous dinosaurs roamed here at the same time, along with armored plant eaters.

Who knows how Theio died? Maybe a group of small meat-eaters got him, or he starved, or drowned in a flood.

But the dinosaur's skeleton probably found its way into the sea, where it was covered with the sand and sediment that eventually fossilized it.

And there it sat for 100 million years, while the second set of Rockies burst from the earth and eroded, and then the third set of Rockies -- the mountains we're familiar with -- were born.

Those mountainmaking forces pushed the sedimentary rock toward the surface, and then erosion finally exposed Theio once again.

A century ago ...

James Hutchinson Kerr graduated from Yale University in 1865, and tuberculosis prompted him to head west to find a cure.

The air and altitude of Colorado Springs suited him well, so Kerr settled here and became a professor of geology and mining at Colorado College soon after the school was founded in 1874.

He began to prospect for fossils in what is now Garden of the Gods park. This handwritten account of his finds is in the special collections at Colorado College:

"In 1878, I discovered in one of the ridges east of the red rocks forming the east boundary of the Garden of the Gods, portions of 21 different sea monsters that had been caught as in a basin, in one of Earth's early paroxisms....Most of these bones and some of the casts were boxed up for Colorado College. The college at that time having no place to store such things, the boxes with other things were placed in barns and cellars and nearly all have been lost."

Records are sketchy, but it appears that Kerr excavated dinosaur- skull fragments in the ridge, and later contacted Othniel Charles Marsh, a fellow Yale man and one of the most aggressive and successful dinosaur hunters of the 19th century.

That's when Theio got caught up in The Bone Wars.

A bitter rivalry between Marsh and fellow bone hunter Edward Drinker Cope drove American paleontology to new heights -- and new depths.

The former friends employed crews to race around the American West to collect as many fossils as they could, and supposedly even spied on each other's digs and used bribery and bullying to get their hands on coveted bones.

The two men took credit for an astonishing number of finds: Marsh is credited with discovering the stegosaurus, diplodocus and allosaurus, for example.

But they also are accused of sloppy science in their mad rush to outdo each other. And some of their mistakes took generations to correct.

"They got pretty nasty with each other," Carpenter said.

"I suspect that Marsh obtained this specimen from Kerr by maybe paying him off. I don't know for sure, but money talks."

Marsh got the Garden of the Gods fossil in 1886 and quickly identified it as a camptosaurus from the Jurassic period. Then he sent it back east to the Yale Peabody Museum.