Bone Bonanza

He is the Dick Tracy of the Mesozoic Age. No matter how softly dinosaurs trod millions of years ago, Dr. Edwin H. Colbert, curator of fossil reptiles of Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History and professor of paleontology at Columbia University, tracks them down and digs out their bones from under the rock layers that hide them. But one dinosaur had always eluded him: the coelophysis, diminutive (3 ft. high, 6 ft. long) but impressive granddaddy of Tyrannosaurus Rex, Brontosaurus and all the other Mesozoic monsters.

One day last fortnight Dr. Colbert and his assistant George Whitaker were exploring Arroyo Yeso, a gypsum gulch on Ghost Ranch, near Abiquin, N. Mex. Suddenly Whitaker uttered a cry of joy, rushed to the bank and pointed triumphantly to a small fossil claw. Dr. Colbert had got his coelophysis.

Soon scientific circles were abuzz with the find. The discovery was the first real proof of what coelophysis was like. Scientists had long suspected that something very much like him lived in the Triassic Period, but they had only a few bone fragments to go on. Now, the diggers believe that they can reassemble coelophysis from his pointed nose to the tip of his long tail. If so, they can fill in a tremendous gap in the study of dinosaur evolution.

Coelophysis emerged from the slime of the Paleozoic Age 200 million years ago, an early step in the transition of life from amphibian to reptilian form. He roamed across North America, from New Mexico to New England. He had large, powerful legs, which carried him around swiftly, and powerful forepaws, well-equipped with claws. He was a ferocious carnivore. Eventually--about 60 million years ago--coelophysis, like all of his fearsome family, disappeared.

Because the bones in Dr. Colbert's quarry are softer than the Chinle (sandy clay) formation that surrounds them, they must be taken up with great care. No attempt is being made to recover individual bones at Ghost Ranch: the entire bonanza is being hewn out in big blocks of rock (one to eight tons each), and shipped to Manhattan. There, in the next few months, experts will remove the matrix of rock around the fossils, and carefully polish and reassemble the skeletons.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.