Accretionary Wedge 50: Bad Karma or the Giant Spaghetti Monster? Microburst at Grand Tetons

Evelyn Mervine at Georneys is the host of this month's Accretionary Wedge, and the topic is a delightful one: Share a fun moment from geology field camp or a geology field trip. You can share a story, a picture, a song, a slogan, a page from your field notebook– anything you like! Thanks loads, Evelyn...how to choose from 30 years of geological journeys??? If you have followed my blog at all, you know it is mostly stories from the road. So how to choose? I finally settled on the story that convinced me that the Giant Spaghetti Monster must really exist, or at least some level of karma...

It was a while back, in the 1990s. We were on our way to Montana to assist at a dino-dig at the original discovery site of the Velociraptor cousin Deinonychus. Excitement was high, as this took place right after Jurassic Park premiered, and we were working at one of the excavations directed by Jack Horner. It was a long drive, and we stopped for a night at Grand Tetons National Park.

What happened that particular evening became one of our department legends. One our students had a knack for fomenting trouble with the powers-that-be in the Universe. On various previous trips he had speculated about what it would be like to get stung by a scorpion, and within a day, he had been (unwillingly) stung by a scorpion. At a stop, he asked if we would see any rattlesnakes. He stepped on one moments later. There was a karma that hung about Craig like a hangman's noose.

There was a discussion that evening at Grand Tetons in the twilight about whether we would experience any bad weather on our journey. The skies were clear that night with just a few puffy clouds about. For some reason, Craig looked towards the heavens, raised a rock hammer towards the sky, and said "I dare the gods to make it rain!". I'm not kidding about what followed. Within ten minutes of his brash statement, our campground was enveloped in a violent storm, our vision obscured by thick blowing dust, and high winds were knocking down old cottonwood trees all around us. Fifteen minutes later the winds died, the dust cleared, and the camp was a shambles. Tents were ripped apart, and branches were down all over our camp. Our vans were undamaged, but a tree had crushed a van in the other part of the campground (people were in it, but were unhurt). We thought we had been hit by a tornado, but more likely it was a microburst from a storm that approached us unseen from the east.

Needless to say, Craig spent much of the rest of the trip muzzled....but this is not the only Craig story. The other involved rattlesnakes, deer, and a lost student. If you are interested, it can be found here....

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Final Discovery

In the last installment of our dinosaur-digging story, we had finally come across evidence that dinosaurs had, in fact, actually lived during the time of the deposition of the Cloverly Formation; we had found deinonychus claws, and bones of tenontosaurs and anklyosaurs. In the final days on the site, we had become fairly sharp at picking out bone fragments on the slopes of the dig site, and two of our party found a fairly significant bone scatter a few yards away from the main quarry.

By working their way up the slope, they found where the bones were emerging, and we started another (much smaller) quarry, and uncovered several dozen bones in situ, of a creature we could not immediately identify. It was smaller than the other species we were expecting to find, and was thus sort of mysterious. We delineated the bone area, and started the process of protecting the exposed bone with "butvar", coating the bones with paper towels and covering the entire mess with plaster. By our last day on the site, we had constructed a giant plaster monstrosity.

The paleo-experts on the dig looked bemusedly at our work, and very politely waited until we had said goodbye and started on our way home before they started tearing off all the plaster and carving the rock mass into smaller parts. The dig was nearly a quarter-mile from the vehicle, and our plaster monster must have weighed 300 pounds! No one wanted to carry it down that hill!

The experts also were nice enough to report on what they found once the specimen had been hauled off to the Museum of the Rockies. Our find turned out to be numerous fragments of a Zephyrosaurus, a species that had been found only once before, and had been named on the basis of a few pieces of the skull, and some vertebrae fragments. We had found leg and claw elements, pieces of a skull, and vertebrae and rib fragments. The animal was a small bipedal herbivore. If your fifth-grader has ever heard of it, it is probably because the kid has a Dinosaur A-to-Z book, and zephyrosaurs are one of the few "Z" dinosaurs!

Images of the bones could be accessed for some time on the Museum website, but they were eventually taken down, so I wonder if they have reconsidered the identification of the specimen. If anyone wants to track it down, it was MOR #759. I would love to know what our creature is up to these days!

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Story of a DinoDig

To continue our story of the Cretaceous history of the Colorado Plateau, we have taken a slight detour to the north to Montana, where the Cloverly Formation stands in for the Cedar Mountain Formation as the critical link between the late Jurassic ecosystems of the Morrison Formation and the later more widespread late Cretaceous formations. As explained in a previous post, this is because I've dug in the Cloverly, but have never seen (or at least recognized) the Cedar Mountain Formation to the south.

Lots of people participate in dinosaur digs, either as researchers, as students, or as paying volunteers through any number of commercial excavators. Our opportunity arose in 1993 when Jack Horner gave a lecture at Modesto Junior College on Tyrannosaurus rex (thus, the photo above). You may recall that at the time the movie Jurassic Park had pretty much re-ignited dinosaur-mania around the country, and Horner had gained some notoriety as a technical advisor for the film-makers. He had also garnered popular attention as the author of several great books about parenting dinosaurs (the Maiasaurs), and T-Rex (horrible predator or scavenger?). So his arrival at MJC caused quite a stir among my geology students, and they (and me too, I guess) hung around him like a bunch of groupies.

Over beer and pizza the next day, Mr. Horner suggested that we could help with one of his digs that coming summer in Montana, if we were at all interested. He stipulated that we could include 7-8 students, we would have to feed ourselves, provide all our camping supplies, get to Montana at our own expense, and that we would be diggers, not brushers and excavators. It would be hot and dusty or rainy and windy, or even snowy. There would be cows. Starstruck, we said yes, sounds fun!

Over the following months, the list of students crept up to 17 (lots of delicate e-mail negotiations), and they worked hard raising funds with burger sales and yard sales. Eventually they raised something like $5,000 to fund our expedition. So, early in June we set forth in our vans on the way to Bridger, Montana. The first day we slogged our way 550 miles to Angel Lake in the Humboldt Range of Nevada, and the next day traveled to Grand Tetons National Park, where we set up camp in the Gros Ventre Group Campground.

What happened that particular evening became one of our department legends for the ages. One our students had a knack for fomenting trouble with the powers-that-be in the Universe. On various previous trips he had speculated about what it would be like to get stung by a scorpion, and within a day, he had been (unwillingly) stung by a scorpion. At a stop, he asked if we would see any rattlesnakes. He stepped on one moments later. There was a karma that hung about Craig like a hangman's noose.

There was a discussion that evening at Grand Tetons in the twilight about whether we would experience any bad weather on our journey. The skies were clear that night with just a few puffy clouds about. For some reason, Craig looked at towards the heavens, raised a rock hammer towards the sky, and said "I dare the gods to make it rain!". I'm not kidding about what followed. Within ten minutes of his brash statement, our campground was enveloped in a violent storm, our vision obscured by thick blowing dust, and high winds were knocking down old cottonwood trees all around us. Fifteen minutes later the winds died, the dust cleared, and the camp was a shambles. Tents were ripped apart, and branches were down all over our camp. Our vans were undamaged, but a tree had crushed a van in the other part of the campground (people were in it, but were unhurt). We thought we had been hit by a tornado, but more likely it was a microburst from a storm that approached us unseen from the east.

Needless to say, Craig spent much of the rest of the trip muzzled....and this story will be continued.