Whenever people ask how I ended up in Wyoming, the answer’s simple: dinosaurs.
I spent years excavating fossils across Wyoming and Montana before taking a hard turn into journalism. Spending three days recently in the Nail Quarry with the Tate Geological Museum and the Western Interior Paleontological Society was a much-welcome return to form.
My first dinosaur discovery was in August 2012 in Thermopolis. It was the ugliest, least exciting piece of dinosaur possible — a rotted and broken rib head from a Late Jurassic Allosaurus. But it was mine, and the exhilaration and teary joy was unforgettable.
More than a decade later, the romance of dinosaur discovery still lies within me but is rarely expressed, especially in the field. I came to the Nail Quarry to be a workhorse — tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.
I came for the dirty work, not the glamour or thrill of discovery. I didn’t intend to find anything, and actively hoped I wouldn’t.
Digging for dinosaur fossils is a bucket list item for millions of people, and the Cowboy State is one of the best places to do it. But it isn’t nearly as glamorous or exhilarating as most imagine it.
Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly of digging Wyoming’s dinosaurs. Let’s go in reverse.
The Ugly
Where to start?
It’s always hot until it’s not. And in the remote places where dinosaurs tend to turn up, you might get a few minutes’ notice before a torrential downpour turns an excruciatingly hot, dusty day into a miserable quagmire of shivering and ankle-deep muck.
Dust gets everywhere on your person and in your stuff. A cloud of dust will emerge whenever you sit in your car, and you’ll find tiny pieces of rock in your pockets for months.
One often emerges from a dinosaur quarry exhausted with bloodshot eyes, eroded nailbeds, sunburns permeating every layer of sunscreen you constantly reapplied and copious amounts of mud in your nose.
Yes, there’s nothing quite like the discovery your snot has turned to mud.
Dinosaur quarries are often small escarpments with limited space, most occupied by fossils and whomever else works there with you. So, you’re constantly contorting yourself to fit wherever you can and are needed, mostly dictated by which direction the fossils decide to go.
Everything’s too heavy, yet extraordinarily delicate, and almost eager to break at the earliest opportunity. Dinosaur fossils can have the same endurance as one of giant hollow chocolate Easter rabbits, only they range from smaller than your thumbnail to bigger than a wheelbarrow.
One of my favorite sayings is, “You don’t realize how uncomfortably you’ve been sitting until you stand up.” Most people wouldn’t choose to lie in a fetal position with fully outstretched arms for several hours at a time, and yet you often do when digging for dinosaurs.
Your dominant arm is sore and swollen, while the other feels numb and stringy. There goes my workout plan.
The local wildlife tends to take an interest, often at the expense of your nerves and peace of mind.
Once after spending a day digging alone in grizzly country near the U.S./Canada border, I saw five young grizzlies running out of the spot where I had been less than 20 minutes before.
The Bad
After millions of years buried in the earth, dinosaur fossils are annoying, inconsiderate, flaky, stubborn and intransigent. They have a sick sense of humor and delight in usurping one’s plans and sanity.
I spent two days isolating a massive plaster jacket at the Nail Quarry. Using knives, chisels, dental picks and my trusty hammer, I carefully removed the mudstone from the edges and bottom of the white blob, careful not to disturb the dinosaurian relics within.
The goal of every jacket is a clean jacket — nothing sticking out of the edge or the bottom. Few things are as rewarding as flipping an immaculate jacket (except maybe marriage or the birth of a child; I wouldn’t know).
So, you can only imagine the raging tempest that formed in my psyche when my nearly perfect jacket was undercut by a tiny black spot with a telltale spongy texture, pristinely preserved. And it kept getting bigger. And bigger. And bigger.
A 150 million-year-old dinosaur bone, discovered by my hand after several hours of hard, tedious work. The first time anyone had seen this piece from a long-extinct Wyoming wildlife.
I was livid.
There were two choices for how to deal with my perfectly placed fossil. Leave it — which meant leaving the jacket for another winter in the ground — or break it.
A catch-22. A saga that happens all too often, to the dismay and frustration of dinosaur diggers everywhere. After some discussion and swearing, we chose the latter.
The bone was glued and consolidated, the rock removed from the rest of the area and the jacket was flipped. My unwanted discovery was a small part of a sizeable, unidentifiable dinosaur bone.
Most of the fossil was in the jacket, but the baseball-sized chuck of black sticking out of the gray mudstone matched up with the much larger black blob sticking out of the large and nearly clean jacket.
A Pyrrhic victory, but I suppose I should consider myself lucky.
Once a fossil is discovered, it should come out of the ground as soon as possible. But in the past, similar discoveries have meant thousands of hours of additional work. The exposed fossils cannot be extracted and might stubbornly remain where they are, a mocking monument of geological complexity for many years.
When “as soon as possible” turns into years of infuriating excavation, there’s reason to get emotional.
Dinosaurs are the worst. Ask any paleontologist, and they’ll tell you so.
The Good
I spent three days doing hard, manual labor in the Nail Quarry, and all I got was a T-shirt.
The navy blue shirts adorned with purple Stegosaurus are only available at the Nail Quarry and are only sold to people who’ve excavated there. You didn’t just buy it, you earned it.
After my final day of digging, I drove the rocky, uncomfortable two-track back to Medicine Bow, exhausted. I was covered in dust, mud and plaster, and I tried to remember when I last had a tetanus booster due to the numerous cuts and punctures I sustained during my stay (all self-inflicted, I should add).
It was the hardest work I had done in months, and all I could think about was when I could get back.
That’s why I saved “the best” for last. The good of dinosaur digging is inexplicable. Dirty, uncomfortable, frustrating, painful, often tragic, occasionally heartbreaking. What’s to enjoy?
The short answer is everything, the bad and the ugly included. It takes a particular person to enjoy digging for dinosaurs for days and weeks on end, and a unique insanity to savor and crave it, as so many do.
I’m lucky enough to be that kind of insane and fortunate enough to be in one of the best places in the world to do it. There’s a reason everyone comes to Wyoming for their dinosaurs.
So, I’ll let my nailbeds heal, turn out my pockets and the resentment toward the glorified rocks that seem determined to spite me gradually ebb away through time or therapy. If the Tate and the quarry queen are crazy enough to let me return to the Nail Quarry, I’ll return as soon as possible.
I came to Wyoming for dinosaurs. Now, I might never leave because of them.
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
