…and now, 150 million years later, so can we.
The Morrison Formation, deposited by rivers, deltas, and shallow seas. In rain or snow it reconstitutes to dinosaur poo—you will never get the mud off your boots.
Where Dinosaurs walked
Tag Archives: Cretaceous
Rock and a Hard Place
Bushwhacking near the Continental Divide Trail. Broken land: stone, mud, sand, concretions. Overall colors are dun, but sometimes, bright against the yellow, a deep red or black. Weathered, skeletal, not a land friendly to humans. No water but the distant Puerco River. Sagebrush and juniper—the piñon is dead from drought.
The particular crisp softness of walking on frost-heaved Cretaceous dirt.
A doe and her grown fawn floated away from us, bouncing light as…but nothing bounces light as a deer.
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Stinky Rattler?
Best discovery: the source of that organic-metallic, pungent odor we call “snake smell.”
It has an oiliness, and always seems to occur near strata of barely-altered Cretaceous swamp not compressed enough to be coal. Yet I’ve heard many a desert rat say, “That’s rattler smell.” It has always made me aware of my ankles.
But it’s a plant. Thick, small, dark green leaves in pairs on a red stem. I couldn’t find it in Weeds of the West, but it looks like a vetch.
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The Lick-Stick Test
In the Cretaceous mud we found a shattered dinosaur thigh by following fragments of petrified bone scattered down an arroyo.
But—I think I’ve explained this before—if you find a tiny piece, how can you tell whether it’s a dissolving dinosaur?
Lick it. If it’s bone, rather than some other stone like agate or silicified wood, the porous vesicles left by once-living cells and capillaries will wick up the moisture of your tongue, and it will stick.
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 