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Members of the crew carefully unearth a vertebra from a Tyrannosaurus rex. Once freed, it was encased in protective plaster. (Tony C. Dreibus) |
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Don't talk to Don and Kathy Wilkening about the movie "Jurassic Park." The same goes for TLC or Discovery Channel programs that show paleontologists unearthing a completely intact dinosaur skeleton with the swing of a pickax and the swipe of a finishing brush.
"It's not three brushstrokes and into the Smithsonian," said Don, who along with his wife hosts weekend and weeklong classes at the Pioneer Trails Regional Museum here. "That's not real paleontology."
Real paleontology is 10-hour days in 95-degree heat, digging at a promising site that you hope holds some remnants of an ancient turtle shell and coming up empty. Real paleontology is carrying 160 pounds of coprolite — that's fossilized dino dung — down the steep slope of a butte on a stretcher.
And real paleontology is what you get if you sign up for Pioneer Trails' field classes held during the summer in the Badlands of North Dakota, a state better known for its unforgiving winters, rolling wheat fields and unending miles of treeless flatlands than it is for fossils.
But in Bowman County, on the southwestern edge of the state, the topography resembles the deserts of Arizona and Mexico. The buttes here seem planted into the ground, and they give this part of the country a singular landscape.
If you are looking for a fun learning experience, this sliver of the Badlands is the place to be. Although some people may think digging in the sand in 90-degree weather is not much of a vacation, it was just what my wife, Heather, and I had been looking for. Heather is a third-grade teacher and thought the field school would make her better able to teach students about topography, geography and, of course, dinosaurs.
We drove from our hometown of Omaha, Neb., to Rapid City, S.D., late last June, stayed overnight and headed north to Bowman the next day. Looking at a map, drivers may suspect the few labeled dots between Rapid City and Bowman are actual towns with actual services. But many are only a house and a shed or, as in one case, a house and a field of hundreds of junked cars.
The three-hour drive along U.S. 85 is all rolling hills and seemingly empty wheat fields. It's scenic for those who like wide-open spaces and the occasional white-tailed deer running alongside the highway. For us, the drive turned tedious after the first couple of hours. Once we saw the first butte sticking out of the landscape, however, we knew we were close to Bowman.
The town of about 1,800 residents is a crossroads for truck drivers hauling grain, oil and minerals from the region. Bowman County sits atop the Williston Basin, which is rich in oil and gas reserves and ranks as one of the top oil- and gas-producing counties in the state.
But it wasn't black gold that Heather and I were hunting. The buttes — composed of sand, stone and clay, twisted by wind and water, and tinted shades of red, brown, orange, yellow and green — hold more than just minerals and oil. They also contain tens of millions of years worth of history, more than 65 million years, in fact. It was about that long ago when a catastrophic event — most likely a meteorite that struck Earth — wiped out the dinosaurs and made way for the rise of mammals.
Here in Bowman County, much of what lived before the event is buried in the buttes. Fossil diggers can see when the theoretical cataclysm happened because the landscape is separated by the K-T Boundary, a line in the sand that splits the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. (The "K" comes from the German form of the word "Cretaceous.") Anything above is less than 65 million years old; anything below is older.
Plants can grow and fossils of mammals can be found above the boundary. Below are the remains of plants and dinosaurs, such as the imposing Tyrannosaurus rex. A T. rex vertebra was what the nine of us — Don, Kathy, five other amateur diggers and Heather and I — were after on the first day of our three-day field school.
Millions of fossils
We headed to a site in Hell Creek — a formation of buttes just north of Rhame, N.D., about a 20-minute drive from Bowman.
Long ago, the Sioux Indians named the area makoshika, meaning "bad land." For good reason. In summer, the temperatures here exceed 90 degrees. Rain is rare, and the wind bounces off the buttes and whips up dust.
The desolate landscape does not easily forgive missteps, and I realized my first at the outset of our first day. Field school is hot, sweaty work, and in an effort to travel light, I hadn't packed a hat or sunglasses. The Wilkenings had given us a list of essential items to pack, but I hadn't followed it closely enough.
We headed up a road that was really just two tracks leading to nowhere. After parking in a field, we trekked for about 15 minutes lugging all sorts of tools — pickaxes, shovels, brushes and buckets. Then Don pointed out a suitable spot among the buttes and we started digging.
The sand floor of the Badlands is several feet to several hundred feet below the surface grass, and out of this sand bottom rise hundreds of buttes that hold millions of fossils.
When dinosaurs roamed the area 65 million years ago, North Dakota was about one degree north of the equator and near an ocean. Temperatures were high and moisture was plentiful, Kathy said. "It was very wet, hot and humid," she said, and full of aquatic animals. We didn't have the humidity, but there was still the heat.
Don told Heather and me to start excavating the side of a butte. The rest of the group — a father-son team from Minneapolis, a woman from Des Moines, a paleontology student from Minot, N.D., and a French student who makes the annual pilgrimage from Paris to dig in the sand here — went around a corner and started excavating.
"It's not three brushstrokes and into the Smithsonian," said Don, who along with his wife hosts weekend and weeklong classes at the Pioneer Trails Regional Museum here. "That's not real paleontology."
Real paleontology is 10-hour days in 95-degree heat, digging at a promising site that you hope holds some remnants of an ancient turtle shell and coming up empty. Real paleontology is carrying 160 pounds of coprolite — that's fossilized dino dung — down the steep slope of a butte on a stretcher.
And real paleontology is what you get if you sign up for Pioneer Trails' field classes held during the summer in the Badlands of North Dakota, a state better known for its unforgiving winters, rolling wheat fields and unending miles of treeless flatlands than it is for fossils.
But in Bowman County, on the southwestern edge of the state, the topography resembles the deserts of Arizona and Mexico. The buttes here seem planted into the ground, and they give this part of the country a singular landscape.
If you are looking for a fun learning experience, this sliver of the Badlands is the place to be. Although some people may think digging in the sand in 90-degree weather is not much of a vacation, it was just what my wife, Heather, and I had been looking for. Heather is a third-grade teacher and thought the field school would make her better able to teach students about topography, geography and, of course, dinosaurs.
We drove from our hometown of Omaha, Neb., to Rapid City, S.D., late last June, stayed overnight and headed north to Bowman the next day. Looking at a map, drivers may suspect the few labeled dots between Rapid City and Bowman are actual towns with actual services. But many are only a house and a shed or, as in one case, a house and a field of hundreds of junked cars.
The three-hour drive along U.S. 85 is all rolling hills and seemingly empty wheat fields. It's scenic for those who like wide-open spaces and the occasional white-tailed deer running alongside the highway. For us, the drive turned tedious after the first couple of hours. Once we saw the first butte sticking out of the landscape, however, we knew we were close to Bowman.
The town of about 1,800 residents is a crossroads for truck drivers hauling grain, oil and minerals from the region. Bowman County sits atop the Williston Basin, which is rich in oil and gas reserves and ranks as one of the top oil- and gas-producing counties in the state.
But it wasn't black gold that Heather and I were hunting. The buttes — composed of sand, stone and clay, twisted by wind and water, and tinted shades of red, brown, orange, yellow and green — hold more than just minerals and oil. They also contain tens of millions of years worth of history, more than 65 million years, in fact. It was about that long ago when a catastrophic event — most likely a meteorite that struck Earth — wiped out the dinosaurs and made way for the rise of mammals.
Here in Bowman County, much of what lived before the event is buried in the buttes. Fossil diggers can see when the theoretical cataclysm happened because the landscape is separated by the K-T Boundary, a line in the sand that splits the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. (The "K" comes from the German form of the word "Cretaceous.") Anything above is less than 65 million years old; anything below is older.
Plants can grow and fossils of mammals can be found above the boundary. Below are the remains of plants and dinosaurs, such as the imposing Tyrannosaurus rex. A T. rex vertebra was what the nine of us — Don, Kathy, five other amateur diggers and Heather and I — were after on the first day of our three-day field school.
Millions of fossils
We headed to a site in Hell Creek — a formation of buttes just north of Rhame, N.D., about a 20-minute drive from Bowman.
Long ago, the Sioux Indians named the area makoshika, meaning "bad land." For good reason. In summer, the temperatures here exceed 90 degrees. Rain is rare, and the wind bounces off the buttes and whips up dust.
The desolate landscape does not easily forgive missteps, and I realized my first at the outset of our first day. Field school is hot, sweaty work, and in an effort to travel light, I hadn't packed a hat or sunglasses. The Wilkenings had given us a list of essential items to pack, but I hadn't followed it closely enough.
We headed up a road that was really just two tracks leading to nowhere. After parking in a field, we trekked for about 15 minutes lugging all sorts of tools — pickaxes, shovels, brushes and buckets. Then Don pointed out a suitable spot among the buttes and we started digging.
The sand floor of the Badlands is several feet to several hundred feet below the surface grass, and out of this sand bottom rise hundreds of buttes that hold millions of fossils.
When dinosaurs roamed the area 65 million years ago, North Dakota was about one degree north of the equator and near an ocean. Temperatures were high and moisture was plentiful, Kathy said. "It was very wet, hot and humid," she said, and full of aquatic animals. We didn't have the humidity, but there was still the heat.
Don told Heather and me to start excavating the side of a butte. The rest of the group — a father-son team from Minneapolis, a woman from Des Moines, a paleontology student from Minot, N.D., and a French student who makes the annual pilgrimage from Paris to dig in the sand here — went around a corner and started excavating.
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