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Can You Dig It?
| Article
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20283 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
1,021 Words |
| Author
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Varda Avnisan
Varda Avnisan writes stories and children's books. |
Are you one of those parents whose kids want to read all the dinosaur books they can find in the library? Do they wonder about those awesome creatures of a bygone era, who roamed the earth for 140 million years? If the answer is yes, then here is a chance for your kids to get a closer look at dinosaurs and dig up the real thing on a professional research site.
For a twenty-four-hour session or for a week, you and your family (children must be ten or older) can become amateur paleontologists. Picture yourself in the Montana badlands, rubbing shoulders with scientists, prospecting for dinosaur fossils, digging up the bones, and learning the techniques to recover and preserve them.
Fifteen miles east of the Rocky Mountains and twelve miles west of Choteau, Montana, lies Egg Mountain. Glacier National Park is just ninety miles farther north. Egg Mountain was named after the discovery of remains of dinosaur nesting colonies. The finds included fossils of dinosaur eggs, embryos, and nests of a duck-billed dinosaur called Maiasaura, meaning "good mother lizard." The site was discovered in 1978 by John Horner, paleontology curator of the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. It gained international recognition because it revealed new and significant information about dinosaur behavior and nurturing habits. It was also the first site in the world where dinosaur hatchlings were found in their nest.
During July and August, the museum operates a field school at this unique site that offers visitor an opportunity to participate in research on dinosaur bones and gain some insights into what life was like during the Cretaceous period, eighty million years ago.
For dinosaur enthusiasts, this is dinosaur country. The bone bed is believed to contain the remains of ten thousand individual duck-billed dinosaurs killed by a volcanic eruption.
The school/camp is set up on a hill next to the bone bed. From here, you can view the landscape. The land is shortgrass prairie, parched and barren. Not much grows here. In the distance, you can see the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, rising majestically to ten thousand feet. A few miles away to the west is the Pine Butte Preserve, owned by the Nature Conservancy, which also runs and protects the dinosaur site. The preserve, which is a swamp surrounded by wetlands, is a habitat to many species of mammals. Every spring, grizzly bears come there from the mountains to feed and raise their
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