G4 – The Bone Wars – Approching – 02

Imagine you are out hiking in a remote portion of the United States. You look down and see what appear to be bones encrusted in rock. What is it you may wonder? The bones are too big to belong to any creature you know. These enormous looking bones are certainly not from any current living species. Does this story sound far-fetched? It shouldn’t because this is how one major Science discovery happened.

In 1877, a school teacher and his friend were out hiking. Arthur Lakes and his friend, H C Beckwith, were at Como Bluff near the town of Morrison, Wyoming. To their surprise, they noticed what appeared to be large bones embedded in a rock. The bones looked like vertebrate, but from what? These bones were huge. As they looked more closely, they believed the bones were from a very large reptile. The friends dug up the bones and sent them to the world’s leading paleontologists. What the friends did not know at the time was that they had found one of the world’s best fossil beds.