Title - Bureau of Land Management Canon City
Paleontology Series
Chapter1, The Cope Quarries
The great bone wars of Canon City began, oddly enough, with a man who was here visiting from Ohio. Oramel Lucas was a student at Overland college, and he came out to Canon City to take a break from his studies and collect fossils. I know, sounds good, right? Well, luck would have it, Oramel found some dinosaur bones just a few miles north of Canon City, and he wrote home to his professor at Overland. Now, if I had been that professor, I would have been so excited I would have been out here even before I got the letter. But, sometimes excitement just isn't enough. And they didn't have enough money to send an expedition. So, Oramel went to plan B, and he wrote to both Marsh and Cope about the bones.
Now Marsh was too slow, but Cope was rewarded for his speedy response. He hired both Oramel and his brother Ira to dig for bones. The result was the first dinosaur quarry at Canon City.
Incidentally, if you want to know more about the Lucases, you can check out their genealogy here, at the Dinosaur Depot Museum.
Lets check out the quarries now, starting with the Cope Lucas quarry.
The Dinosaur quarries of Garden Park are located along the Gold Belt Scenic Byway, not far from the Dinosaur Depot Museum.
The Cope quarry, which actually consists of 15 smaller quarries, is the most difficult to reach, but it's the easiest to see from far away. The long distance view of the area consists of three parts. Those flatbeds on each side are known as forts – there's a north fort and a south fort. That point in the middle is called Cope's nipple.
From these quarries came some truly fantastic skeletons, especially the carnivorous Allosaurus, and the type specimen of the sauropod dinosaur Camarasaurus. You see a type specimen is like the encyclopedia of the biological world. It defines the species, and gives scientists something to look at for reference when making identifications, so it's really important to science.
Writer drew an illustration of Cope's Camarasaurus and presented it to the public in Philadelphia. But the really cool thing about this drawing is that it was life-sized.
It really gave people of the time, many of whom had never seen a dinosaur before, a really dramatic first impression. This copy is only one quarter the size of Cope's original, which was 60 feet long. But the most exciting discovery at Cope's quarry was when the men unearthed a fossil of truly incredible proportions. The bone, a single vertebrae was larger than a fully grown man. The dinosaur it belonged to would have been almost 200 feet long, dwarfing the record holding Diplodicas Delorum and Supersaurus by almost 85 feet. This massive creature was dubbed Amphicoelias fragillimus, which means doubly hollow and very fragile, referring to the nature of the bones collected. Maybe giving the dinosaur this name was a bad omen. Paleontologist Ken Carpenter explains.
Ken Carpenter
I'm standing next to the reconstructed vertebrae of Amphicoelias fragillimus – it's over 8 feet tall. This reconstruction is based on a description by Edward Drinker Cope in 1877, of just this upper part. But, using the dimensions we were in fact able to reconstruct the entire vertebrae, just to give us some idea of what it might have looked like. Now, the big question is, what happened to the original. It's been lost for ever since Cope's description. And in fact if it wasn't for the description, we'd have no evidence of this fossil at all. I suspect that at the time, since they weren't using any kind of preservatives to harden up the fossil bones, since it's so fragile, is that when it was shipped back east and Cope made some illustrations, he probably tried to rotate the bones to illustrate more of it, and I suspect at that point it fell apart. Now why would I think that? Well it turned out that in 1995 we had excavated some bones not to far from where this came from. We brought it back to our museum. And those bones were so fragile, that when I actually moved one of them, a good chunk of it fell apart in pieces. I think the species name is kind of a clue – called fragillimus, because the bones were very fragile. And I suspected that the specimen actually fell apart, and they ended up throwing it away.
Host
This, and the other famous dinosaurs found here were enough to affect the jealousy of Cope arch rival Othniel Charles Marsh. He opened up his own quarries here, and the bone wars were on!
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