A question please: are the ND fossils especially well preserved, or was there more life and activity there? Thanks.
A little of both. Because ND has a wide variety of rock weathering at the surface (Pierre Shale, Fox Hills, Hell Creek, Cannonball, etc.), the representation of fossil plants and animals is broad. Some states are known for one predominant formation, while we have many due to erosion.
Nice article, but the statement that the state was "largely untouched by glaciation" is incorrect. Much of the eastern portion of the state was overridden by ice during the Pleistocene. In fact, the present day course of the Missouri River through the state is a result of the position of the ice sheet. And at the very end of the ice age, there was a vast meltwater lake in easternmost North Dakota, called Glacial Lake Agassiz.
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Would the author, or another reader, have any idea as to whether I could participate without being able to drive? This is the type of 'working vacation' I would actually love to join, if some kind of arrangement for transportation were available, whether with other participants or organizers?
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and if you have a passport you can cross into canada and see the same thing.
there were mentions in the piece of people being dinosaurs.....if you want to personalize it, i wonder how many trump voters would believe this piece since a lot of them--the born again 'folks' who overlooked trump's many faults--believe the universe is somewhere around 6000 years old.
there were mentions in the piece of people being dinosaurs.....if you want to personalize it, i wonder how many trump voters would believe this piece since a lot of them--the born again 'folks' who overlooked trump's many faults--believe the universe is somewhere around 6000 years old.
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The writer refers to mountains in North Dakota more than once in her piece, including that she sat on a mountain's edge. There are no mountains in North Dakota. Not even close. Buttes and mesas, but nary a mountain.
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Rhinos in Botswana? Where?
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You have to feel sorry for those poor Native Americans in the Dakotas, being chased around the countryside by hungry dinosaurs, a mere 6,000 years ago.
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If you go to Medora the Cowboy Cafe is the best for breakfast. The Rough Rider has great prime rib.
When in Dickinson, you can find outdoor gear at the Newby's Ace hardware store right off of 94 at Third Avenue. The Brick house downtown and if you want great home town cooking go to Jacks on the west end of town.Yeah and Jack and his son run it. He's the one at the cash register.
Oso who married one of Bunny Manns daughters from Dickinson
When in Dickinson, you can find outdoor gear at the Newby's Ace hardware store right off of 94 at Third Avenue. The Brick house downtown and if you want great home town cooking go to Jacks on the west end of town.Yeah and Jack and his son run it. He's the one at the cash register.
Oso who married one of Bunny Manns daughters from Dickinson
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As an aside, the former dinosaurs would not fully recognized their land for other reasons than climate and lanscape changes.
The North Dakota badlands are now litterally lit and littered by fracking, with hundreds of pits all around the north and eastern parts of the Little Missouri National Grasslands.
I hiked the area north southerly 30 years ago ( a geologic eternity) and what I saw recently is an environmental disaster, fracking encroaching each dented area around the federally designed limits of the Grasslands.
The North Dakota badlands are now litterally lit and littered by fracking, with hundreds of pits all around the north and eastern parts of the Little Missouri National Grasslands.
I hiked the area north southerly 30 years ago ( a geologic eternity) and what I saw recently is an environmental disaster, fracking encroaching each dented area around the federally designed limits of the Grasslands.
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I visited ND in August of 2001, looking to get far away from NYC. Lovely people, terrible coffee.
Highlights included hiking in TR National Park, staying with a ranch family in the far west and visiting a neighborhood rodeo with them, and a warm welcome from the big monastery near Dickinson. Driving through miles of wheat and sunflower fields was beautiful and somewhat exotic to me. I only hope the oil and gas industry hasn't destroyed the landscape.
Highlights included hiking in TR National Park, staying with a ranch family in the far west and visiting a neighborhood rodeo with them, and a warm welcome from the big monastery near Dickinson. Driving through miles of wheat and sunflower fields was beautiful and somewhat exotic to me. I only hope the oil and gas industry hasn't destroyed the landscape.
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And the comment about the ancient bird remains v. "extinct" dinos? Haven't paleontologists now agreed that birds are dinosaurs? I mean modern-day birds.
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Are any of these programs are subsidized even indirectly by the petrochemical industry? I would love to also get a expert tour of another kind of extraction which makes a difference in my daily life. What a twofer!!
Well, but you wouldn't be digging them up yourself! It's the dig that's the point here.
Unfortunately, dinosaurs still roam North Dakota government.
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Thank you for this article honoring the land & the initial citizenry. The Playwrights Sanctuary now plans to make the trip there to write in that vortex. The Sanctuary is dedicated to mentoring the works of new & younger dramatists. Directed by Dr Larry Myers, professor at St John's University in Manhattan/activist/producer the group is now engaged in penning plays about the tent city people of San Francisco. Endorsed by the late legendary Playwright Edward Albee the Sanctuary is bringing stature & relevance back to the art of writing for the stage. Dr Myers was recently in North Dakota at Standing Rock.
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Good piece. One small correction. One of the locations of the digs, Marmath, is actually spelled Marmarth. The name was concocted from letters of the first and middle names of Margaret Martha Finch, by her great grandfather, Albert J. Earling, a railroad magnate. The town itself is a treasure, nestled in trees at the south end of the North Dakota Badlands on the banks of the Little Missouri River. Among other things, it has a great bar and steakhouse located in an early 1900s sandstone building and a nicely preserved theater called the Mystic Theatre, circa 1914. There was a limited amount of lodging, last I knew, some of it in what used to be a rooming house for railroaders.
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I love reading about geology in terms of the big picture and have collected rock, mineral, and fossil specimens locally before, so I am not making fun of the article, which is interesting, but I wonder if you might have more luck finding good specimens in Washington DC.
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Sure, if you go to the National Museum of Natural History. Lots of specimens there and someone has already done all the hard work.
Unfortunately some of the best mosasaur fossil sites in the world were destroyed when a farm road was illegally built right through the Pembina Gorge. The builders knew their construction was illegal at the time. But the state did nothing to stop them.
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There's a wonderful fossil discovery site just north in Morden, Manitoba with one of the largest mosasaur fossils in North America.
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North Dakota is one of the two states that I have never been to (Iowa is the other). Until now I had no particular urge to visit North Dakota, but this article may very well have changed my mind.
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As someone who does this for recreation I'd like to thank you for this great article!
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As a person who actually does this in California I want to thank you much for this great report.
It's quite Jurassic of you!
It's quite Jurassic of you!
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Cretaceous, actually.
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Not relevant to the main point of this article, but...there is no natural landscape (or more-or-less natural, since we have messed with just about everywhere) that is not inherently and uniquely beautiful and, and there is no place with "nothing there". I now live along California's beautiful central coast and last summer on a cross-country journey drove through ND where I was awed by its beauty, especially those Badlands. All the other states I crossed, whether in "flyover" country or on either coast, had miles and miles of spectacular landscape, even along I-80. What a country!
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Very nice article. It's great to read a well written article about our prehistoric past that has nothing to do with politics! :)
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Alright, that was a good read. Pretty cool.
I have to make due around my property looking for Devonian Echinoderms, Bryozoans and an occasional not-very-good specimen of Trilobyte. May have to visit the Dakotas some summer.
I have to make due around my property looking for Devonian Echinoderms, Bryozoans and an occasional not-very-good specimen of Trilobyte. May have to visit the Dakotas some summer.
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Not much has changed since prehistoric times. The dinosaurs were so bored by North Dakota they just laid down and died en masse, and still today boredom kills many in the state.
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Looks like great fun. What a planet we live on.
Where is the eccentric billionaire who gets a team of scientists together to create a ND Jurassic park from the mosquito buried in amber ? Where is the exploitation for massive monetary gain ? I want my theme park !
I'm disappointed ... sigh
I'm disappointed ... sigh
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You got it. Reading this, I was thinking if I were on a dig, I'd always be listening for roar of incoming chopper to whisk me off to island off cost of Costa Rica.
When I saw the title of this article, I was very intrigued. when I was younger I used to love dinosaurs and spend time thinking about how they really became extinct. I've always dreamed of being able to go to an excavation site and dig up a dinosaur but reading this article made me feel like I was right there with them. The author put in many specific details that really showed the extent of just how amazing the remains are in North Dakota. This article makes me want to head to North Dakota right now and volunteer to see some of the common remains down there like Rhinos and saber-tooth cats or maybe even find a partial bird skeleton. I learned a lot of new things from this article and I am glad I decided to read it based on the title.
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I am very relieved to hear that non-humans, especially those with big teeth, do not eat, but rather they feed on. I eat, you eat, they feed on. It's better that they be kept at some distance. With those big teeth and all.
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I enjoy the fact that really anybody can assist the digs and not just paleontologists. Is cool that they were able to tell how the "dino mummy" probably died just by looking at its remains.
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It's nice to read a good article about my beloved home state, how it makes such things so available to the public. But of course I had to notice the bit of urban silliness in calling the Badlands "mountains"...not quite, Hillary. But a good job describing how you enjoyed the experience, the friendliness of the people in charge with their willingness to share their knowledge. It's a great area - and you did mention how the program is being cut back, just one specific instance of the huge damage this current so-called administration wants to inflict on so many wonderful programs and agencies. Such a sad situation, that we can find billions of dollars for unneeded war materials, but no money or support for great endeavors, especially of scientific or other knowledge-related projects.
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A wonderful popularization of fossil hunting! Fossils are the only evidence that we have of evolution, but all that, what we find is only "road kill", with the missing links remaining just that -- missing links.
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and who were the humans living with the dinosaurs..please give equal time to creationist thought..and did the flood wipe these poor creatures out?
NOT!!JK!
NOT!!JK!
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Well, no one said God created in days as we know it. There very well could've been thousands of years between days. So, I can indeed believe dinosaurs roamed the earth well before humans.
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The humans were lunch. Animals as large as dinosaurs can eat a lot of human beings. A whole village. They tasted just like chicken.
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"Rain and sediment washed carcasses from shorelines into moving water, which buried them and effectively preserved them for eternity."
Obviously not.
Obviously not.
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The remains of Dakota the duck-billed dinosaur are fossilized, not mummified, contrary to the caption. What a great citizen science adventure--that requires a lot of sunscreen and a wide-brimmed hat.
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I believe the intent was to say that the animal was mummified before it was fossilized, leaving evidence of soft tissue in addition to bones.
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They were mummified before they were fossilized - an important distinction since their mummification lead to an intact fossilization of soft tissue. A similar find in Alberta yielded high resolution of skin surface features among other rarely found structures.
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Note: Contributing to the excitement over the discovery of Dakota was the presence of original organic material in addition to mineralized tissue. (Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, "Mineralized Soft-Tissue Structure and Chemistry in a Mummified Hadrosaur From the Hell Creek Formation, North Dakota (USA)" by Phillip L. Manning, et al.
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Sounds like great activity that got me to thinking that ND might be a fun place to visit.
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It is!!!!!!
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I love this story. Makes me want to hop in the car and go dig for fossils.
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What a wonderful story for us fellow Rock Hounds. I love that area of the Dakotas for its history and vast beauty. Next time, I will plan a trip with a few extra days so that I can volunteer.
I have many great fossils that originated from this area and many great memories on trips to buy them. Just makes me smile thinking about them!
Thanks for the feel-good story of the day! I really enjoyed it!
I have many great fossils that originated from this area and many great memories on trips to buy them. Just makes me smile thinking about them!
Thanks for the feel-good story of the day! I really enjoyed it!
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Indeed, thanks this article made me wish that I had seen it 45 years ago ,now at 90 with legs all but gone I can only envy such a beautiful opportunity; Thanks again.
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That's actually pretty cool. I may try to do that in 2018. Thanks for the article.
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Sandbars on the Kaw yield similar remains, reduced to tooth and claw, but worth the trip.
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