Newspapers / The Cherokee Scout (Murphy, … / Dec. 23, 1937, edition 1 / Page 18
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v i m , -I,* mk B^^anHMraHSHv \JHHk. JH8K aPBigWPjM^Ml If- y Jt? : j . ^ V' "A" I'l.oto copyright t?y Amcriesin Muw-um Apatosaurs. or brontosaurs?a type ab in Dinosaur National Monuvru By Dr. Frank Tht MUSEUM walls ofTer magnificent opportunity and challenge to curator, sculptor, mural painter. You can back up against them a pair of majestic Assyrian winged bulls, brought from a longburied city of the East. You can cover llum with Byzantine mosaics, rescued from the ruins of an ancient basilica. You can paint upon them vivid panoramas of life as it was when the earth was young. In the halls of the great museums where the mighty bones of giants of the past are displayed, it is not uncommon to set against the walls' wide spaces huge slabs of rock with the dinosaur fossils still sticking in them, the stone uiiscuu ciwiijr to icavc me ixmes pro- i jetting in high relief. A paddle-1 imbed ; plesiosaurus, for example, just as he sank to the bottom of the sea and died t and decayed, a hundred million years 1 ago, scarce a bone in his immense skele- ; Ion budged out of place. 1 But scientists are out now to outdo 1 their own accomplishments. Not even i the halls of the greatest museums suf- J lice to contain their ambitions. PThe world's first carven cliff of dino- 1 sour bones is now shaking under the i tii ills and picks and hammers of work- < men preparing the way for the scientific ? chiselmen who will follow, to bring about the resurrection of a whole mass of saurian fossils and show them, in place, as on a mighty wall, to be seen and wondered at by men. The place is Dinosaur National Monument, in northwestern Utah, one of the smaller areas included in the U. S. National Park system, but not administered as a National Park. r P11E concept of carving away the stone covering that hides a whole clifT of dinosaur bones is a bold one. It wras originated by the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, Barnum Brown. As with all bold concepts, the idea of a cliff-face museum of dinosaur bones is fundamentally simple. It takes advantage of two outstanding things: a most unusual accumulation of saurian fossil skeletons, many of them complete and little disturbed; and a lucky chance of geology that turned what was once a floor into a wall. When the dinosaur bones were deposited in the particular stratum that is the reason-for-being of Dinosaur National Monument, that stratum was the bottom of some oozy coastal lagoon or wide river estuary. The great carcasses drifted into one rather limited area, nudged along by some trick of wind or water current, sank to the bottom, and eventually became buried 3 ACIiQ | ' >( Natural History. ft?WL'|itfl^T^MS>B undantlv represented ?nt deposits. ?nc skeletons. That was in Jurassic time, which ended years ago. The Jurassic was the heart of ' the 200-million-year- Jk ' long Age of Reptiles Then ruled on heavens above, and in the waters that are under the earth such an array of rep- How the ma tilian giants as were never before seen *nd never shall be seen again. Greatest of these, at least in bulk, kvere the sauropods; they included the nonster brontosaurs and diplodocus, tnd the rarest and most gigantic of all, he huge barosaur?bodies as big as ooxcars, necks like palm-tree trunks, nterminable tails. Barosaur measured JO feet over all. Into the quiet water of the ancient agoon they drifted, their skeletons pilng up side by side and overlapping ?ach other?a charnel-pit of giants, jnder the water and the drifting silt. An aerial photograph showing Eof DIN K?S2iS:.^. iSlr ? ' <568K . * ,j issive bones of a dinosaur are carved out exact position of the sheletoi Ever thicker piled the silt; with unimaginable slowness but with inevitable sureness it hardened into stone, sealing the fossilized bones tightly in place. All this time the land was flat; the great mountains of the West had not yet begun to lift their heads. HPHEN the slow heaving began. The mountains grew to the youthful ripeness that is now theirs?for the Rocky Mountain system is young, geologically speaking. Strata were bent and tilted until some of them stood on end. Among .. i. 11mi iii iiiTwn" - -r-r-xfT' Photo by Rarnnm Rrown. excavation of the monument site. OSAUR ONES 11 them were the strata in which the ",rtsaur bones were sandwiched; they ly came to stand at an angle ot ' degrees?just a little back-slope 1 the vertical. How much ol the dinosaur layer was exposed to the weathering of ages ai d so lost, fossils and all, can never be known. But the part that is left a veritable Bonanza of bones?waiting to be mined. For the "cliff" of fossils which B,.rnum Brown's enthusiasm and tenacity is changing from dream into reality c a buried cliff. You have to dig dov.n and clear away the other rock layers from in front of it to get at it. The sculptors take an existing clilT and carve faces and figures upon it. The scientist has to make his cliff first; but the patterns for the sculpture will be on :t when he gets it dug out. Dinosaur bones were first dug at this Carnegie Museum Photo. . Square markings aid in charting the i in the rock. site by Dr. Earl Douglass of the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh. The U. S. National Museum and the University of Utah have also removed many fossils. These diggings worked across the exposed top of the fossil-bearing stratum, and down either end; but there is still a great buried slab in the middle. It is to expose this that an artificial canyon now is hpincf Hnt* in groups of government emergency labor under the direction of the U. S. National Park Service. After this deep, long pit has been completed will come the turn of the skilled chiselmen of the American Museum of Natural History. With air-driven tools they will carve away the embedding matrix of stone from around the bones, leaving them firmly fastened to the background with the cement of ages, but standing out clear and bold in high relief. It will not do, of course, to leave these carefully carved-out fossils exposed to the weather, particularly the powerful weather of the West, stormy in winter, hot in summer. The precious carvings would begin to erode away immediately. CO Mr. Brown's plans call for a vaulted roof to cover the whole thing?the artificial canyon 40 feet wide, with its north wall, bearing the fossil carvings, 30 feet high and 100 feet long. The building will be mostly roof, because the entire "hall" is underground. Mr. Brown visions it: "Spotlights will be directed on each of the skeletons. In the center of the room are to be placed lifelike models, made to scale, of each of the animals whose skeletons are seen ir> lhp rnrV ?? *V,? wall of the building will b? placed a gigantic mural 190 feet long and 20 feet high, showing the topography of the country, the flora, and the animals in their natural habitat as they existed 140 million years ago."
The Cherokee Scout (Murphy, N.C.)
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Dec. 23, 1937, edition 1
18
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