Marsh [Felch] Dinosaur Quarry Maps and Letters Website
Garden Park Fossil Area
The Garden Park Fossil Area is one of the most productive and historically important areas in the western United States for the understanding of Late Jurassic dinosaur faunas. The Garden Park area is one of the few places in the Western United States where dinosaur remains occur from bottom to top of the Morrison Formation. They have been collected from no fewer than 25 quarries in the Garden Park area, which is the “type locality” of many species of famous dinosaurs, including species of Allosaurus, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus. Three almost complete skeletons of Stegosaurus stenops, Colorado’s State Fossil, have been found and collected from the area. The Morrison in Garden Park also has produced the first-known Jurassic mammal fossils from the Western United States and reptile, freshwater-pelecypod, freshwater-gastropod, and land-plant fossils.
Quarrying of dinosaurs from Garden Park started in 1877. Oramel Lucas, a local schoolteacher, found dinosaur bones in this area a year earlier and contacted both Edward Drinker Cope at the Philadelphia Museum of Natural History and Othniel C. Marsh at the Yale Peabody Museum. Cope and Marsh were two famous vertebrate paleontologists who were beginning a vitriolic professional rivalry that lasted for more than 25 years. The “bone wars”, as they have been called, largely centered on the discovery and descriptions of the dinosaurs from the American West.
Cope was the first to reply to Oramel Lucas. He and his brother Ira started quarrying dinosaurs for Cope in the summer of 1877. The bones of the Cope Quarries came out of soft siltstones from high in the formation, where the bones were quite hard and easy to excavate. The Lucases continued to work their quarry for Cope until 1883.
Marsh quickly learned of Cope’s excavations in the area, and Marsh sent out his collectors to the area later in the summer of 1877 to collect dinosaur bones. Marsh’s collectors contacted Marshall P. Felch, a local rancher, who had discovered dinosaur bones in the summer of 1876 at another location. The brittle bones found by Felch were from the middle of the formation in a hard sandstone that made their excavation difficult. Marsh’s collectors worked for two summers, became frustrated with the difficulty in the excavation of the bones, and finally turned their searches to new areas. Meanwhile, Felch and his relatives continued to excavate their quarry for Marsh until the summer of 1888.
Specimens from these two quarries are now on display at the
Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut, the
American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution) in Washington, D.C. Other museums that have opened dinosaur quarries in the area include the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Denver Museum of Natural History (now the Denver Museum of Nature and Science) and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio.
The quarries now occur on Federal lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and have special management as part of a larger Research Natural Area. Casual collecting of fossils is not permitted in the area, but collecting permits for scientific research projects are available. For more information contact the BLM office in Cañon City.
Geologic Setting
Garden Park was named for the truck farms that supplied fresh vegetables and produce to the mining towns in the Cripple Creek District by way of the Shelf Road, which was completed in 1892 northward from Cañon City and Florence, through Garden Park, to Cripple Creek and Victor.
Geologically, Garden Park itself is formed by a large fault-bounded depression, or graben, on the north side of the Cañon City Basin. Precambrian crystalline rocks occur outside the graben as mountains east, north and west of Garden Park, with a sequence of Ordovician, Mississippian, Pennsylvanian, Jurassic, and Lower Cretaceous sedimentary rocks exposed within the structural depression. The southern gateway into the Garden Park area is the large hogback formed from the sandstones of the Dakota Group that are inclined to the south. The Morrison Formation occurs as low badlands along the valley of Fourmile Creek that opens up into the wide valley of Garden Park. Garden Park proper occurs north of the Morrison exposures where erosion of the Pennsylvanian Fountain Formation has formed a wide valley.
The Morrison along Fourmile Creek is locally covered by a jumbled set of large Dakota sandstone blocks that have slid downward and broken apart as parts of a series of huge landslides. These large blocks slid on a surface within the middle of the Morrison Formation where swelling clays of the purple and red upper Morrison mudstones abruptly overlie a sequence of non-swelling clays that make up the greenish-gray lower Morrison mudstones. The upper Morrison rocks and the sandstones of the Dakota Sandstone were involved in these landslides as Fourmile Creek cut a progressively deeper valley in the rocks. Landslide debris covers most of the Morrison exposures, except along badland gully walls and ridges. The dinosaur quarries occur in these Morrison outcrops.
Dinosaur Quarry Stops
Two roadside stops occur near two of the historic quarries in the area. From the south, the first is at the Cleveland Quarry (also known as the Delfs Quarry, named for Edwin Delfs, who excavated the quarry for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History between 1954 and 1957). This stop is 6.4 miles north of the intersection of U.S. 50 and Raynolds Avenue on the east (right) side of the road. It is a developed Bureau of Land Management rest stop with picnic tables, a restroom, and interpretive signs. The Cleveland Quarry was across Fourmile Creek near the valley bottom and produced one of the most complete known skeletons of the primitive long-necked sauropod, Haplocanthosaurus delftsi. The skeleton is the only mounted specimen of this genus and is on display in at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio.
The area around the Delfts Quarry rest stop has produced a number of other fossil finds, including a nest of eggs thought to be from the small dinosaur Othnielia. The eggs of this nest are now on display at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
The second stop is that of the Marsh-Felch Quarry (Figs. GDP-1 and -2), located only 0.2 mile north of the Cleveland Quarry stop. The pull off for this stop is on the west (left) side of the road next to a monument showing some of the dinosaurs of the Garden Park area (and some that haven’t been found in the area, including Tyrannosaurus rex, a Late Cretaceous dinosaur). A 0.25-mile long hiking trail (one way) leads from the north side of this monument to an overlook of the Marsh-Felch Quarry. The trail is an easy walk (but is wheelchair accessible for only a short distance), and it includes several interpretive signs along the route and at the overlook. The Marsh-Felch Quarry is the type locality for a number of dinosaur species, including Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Diplodocus, Haplocanthosaurus, Labrosaurus, Morosaurus, and Stegosaurus. The bones of 65 dinosaur individuals were found in this quarry.
The dinosaur bones at the main part of the Marsh-Felch Quarry accumulated in a pool near the deepest part of a channel at the tip of a major stream bend. Two kinds of bone accumulations were found at this site. The first kind consists of scattered (disarticulated) individual bone specimens and a few articulated specimens, typically strings of neck or tail vertebrae of the long-necked sauropod dinosaurs. These bones were washed in and accumulated gradually in the deep hole at the tip of the river bend. The second type of accumulation consists of almost complete skeletons, three of which have been collected from this quarry. These are Allosaurus fragilis, Ceratosaurus nasicornus, and Stegosaurus stenops and represent the remains of three individuals that died at the river bend, probably during a drought when this was the last waterhole in the area. The skeleton of the Stegosaurus stenops is very complete, represents the type specimen for the species, and is now on display at the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution) in Washington, D.C. The skeletons of Allosaurus and Ceratosaurus from the quarry are also on display at the Smithsonian. The first Jurassic mammals discovered in North America came from this quarry as well.
The Felschs completed their excavations in 1888, but the Carnegie Museum of Natural History worked the quarry in 1900 and 1901. This quarry has not been worked since then, but the spoils piles can be seen from the lookout below the cliff at the base of the quarry, and remains of the old wagon road to and from the quarry can still be seen.
Cope Quarries in Garden Park—Traveling north on the Gold Belt Byway from the Marsh-Felch Quarry stop, the road crosses Fourmile Creek. On the west side of the valley at a point 1.9 mile north of the bridge over Fourmile Creek, you can clearly view a thick sequence of rock exposures, capped by two rounded buttes. All the rocks from the Pennsylvanian Fountain Formation to the lower part of the Dakota Group can be seen in these outcrops. Looking to the west, the intense-maroon cliffs at the base of the valley are outcrops of sandstone and conglomerate of the Fountain Formation. They are capped by pink to light-brown sandstones of the Bell Ranch Formation of middle Jurassic age. The entire Morrison Formation is exposed in these cliffs, including the lower green mudstone and sandstone sequence, the middle purple mudstones, and the upper red mudstones and siltstones. The very light yellow (almost white) sandstone and conglomerate ledges near the top of the buttes is the Lytle Sandstone of the Dakota Group. The brown sandstone ledges at the top of the buttes are part of the lower Dakota Group.
The Cope Quarries occur near the base of the conical butte at the skyline between the two round buttes. Cope and Lucas called the small butte “The Nipple” by Cope and Lucas and the two buttes were called “The Forts.” A series of dinosaur quarries within red siltstones extended from the base of “The Nipple” to the south toward the south “Fort.” These quarries include the type locality of Camarasaurus supremus, a long-necked sauropod dinosaur with a short nose, discovered in 1877. A full-sized drawing of this dinosaur was constructed and went on display at Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park in December of that year, calling the widespread attention to the dinosaurs from the Garden Park area.
Perhaps no one location in the Garden Park Fossil Area better illustrates the significance of the area than the Marsh [Felch] Dinosaur Quarry. The quarry has produced ten vertebrate holotypes, including eight dinosaurs. The diversity of dinosaur species is high, making this one of the most species rich quarries within the Morrison Formation. Some of the best-known specimens of dinosaur skulls and skeletons came from this quarry, and are currently on display at the National Museum of Natural History. These include the holotypes of Stegosaurus stenops, Ceratosaurus nasicornis, Allosaurus fragilis, and the skull of Diplodocus longus. Similar to the quarry sandstone at Dinosaur National Monument, the Marsh Felch quarry represents the accumulation of bones in an ancient river channel.
In celebration of the 100 year anniversary of The Antiquities Act, the BLM paired with the Garden Park Paleontologic Society to develop a website that features an interactive map of the Marsh [Felch] Dinosaur Quarry. Through a series of letters written to Othneil C. Marsh, the website describes the life and findings of Marshall P. Felch over the several years that he spent working in the Marsh [Felch] Quarry.
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