Harvesting Historical Riches

The Garden Park Battle of the Bones

Once again, nearly ten years after the Colorado gold rush, men raced westward in search of treasures hidden within the Rockies. Wielding pick-axes, shovels, and scrapers, fortune hunters scrambled for the best quarries, jealously guarded their diggings, and sometimes jumped each other's claims. But these men weren't after mineral wealth. They sought scientific riches to fill vaults in their East Coast museums. They wanted dinosaur bones. And Colorado's mountains held the mother lode.

Ten years after the Pikes Peak gold rush, O. W. Lucas unearthed fossilized dinosaur bones about five miles north of Cañon City in a place called Garden Park. Learning of the discovery, competing paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh raced to develop fossil quarries, classify new species, and publish reports. Their acrimonious rivalry, known to history as the Great Dinosaur Race, pushed paleontology-and present-day Fremont County-into the forefront of world scientific inquiry. In 1998 the Garden Park Paleontology Society and the Bureau of Land Management completed a State Historical Fund-supported project to ensure that the battle of the bones will never be forgotten.

As a rule, the Fund does not support paleontology projects. However, the Garden Park Fossil Area project is an exception: In addition to having scientific value, the site is associated with significant historical events and people. Marsh and Cope were two of the most influential paleontologists of the nineteenth century. Their competition for fossils and fame-played out in the Garden Park quarries, in newspaper articles, and in scientific journals-shaped the study of dinosaurs and related fields for decades.

Grubstaked by wealthy families, museums, and the federal government, Marsh and Cope scoured the Great Plains in search of fossilized bones in the early 1870s. Both men-working independently-made startling discoveries, but the fossil record remained fragmentary. Their big break came in 1877 when they received letters from schoolteacher Arthur Lakes detailing "some enormous bones" near Morrison, Colorado (present-day Dinosaur Ridge). Marsh wound up with the fossils, but Cope did not concede defeat.

Soon after Lakes's discovery, Cope received word from O. W. Lucas about unusual fossils north of Cañon City. This time he beat Marsh to the punch by purchasing the fossils at a rate of ten cents a pound. Working with specimens packed in protective plaster "jackets" sent via train to his office in Philadelphia, he named the beast Camarasaurus, "the largest or most bulky animal capable of progression on land."

A race between crews sponsored by Cope and Marsh to exhume more fossilized dinosaur remains in Garden Park ensued. Scientific papers flowed out of Marsh's Yale Peabody Museum and Cope's Academy of Natural Sciences almost as fast as crates from Colorado arrived. Between 1877 and 1886 the two men named and described several new and important species of Jurassic-period dinosaurs found at their Garden Park quarries. While working for Marsh, Marshall Felch and Benjamin Mudge discovered several species that most schoolchildren are familiar with today, including Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus (Brontosaurus), and Brachiosaurus.

The Garden Park Paleontology Society's project, completed with assistance from the Bureau of Land Management (which owns the site), increases access to the Marsh Quarry and interprets the historic work completed there and in nearby quarries. The project's partners built a quarter-mile trail that escorts visitors to exhibits and views of the quarry. Signs recall the excitement felt by workers when they found dinosaur bones during the Great Dinosaur Race; signs also map the exact locations where dinosaurs were found between 1877 and 1901 and carry the story forward to important discoveries made as recently as 1992.

Though many of the historic fossils discovered at the Marsh Quarry and other nearby sites are retained by the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., Coloradans can see some important specimens closer to home. The Garden Park Paleontology Society's Dinosaur Depot Museum in Cañon City houses 100-million-year-old fossilized bones, a working fossil laboratory, and other interesting objects and exhibits. The Prehistoric Journey exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science features a complete Stegasaurus skeleton discovered by Cañon City High School science teacher Frederick Kessler and his students in the Garden Park Fossil Area.

BY BEN FOGELBERG, Editor, Colorado History NOW