Don Hopey, Post-Gazette photos Students in the University of Pittsburgh's field course fan out over an area in the Allen L. Cook Spring Creek Preserve near Rock River, Wyoming to begin prospecting for fossils.

By Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

ROCK RIVER, Wyo. -- On this wide and windy, high desert plain, 40 miles northwest of Laramie, there are dinosaur bones sticking out of the ground that look like chunks of iron or mahogany, and sometimes, in sunshine, glint like gold.

	Students in the University of Pittsburgh's field course collect dinosaur fossils in a grid they have laid out on the Allen L. Cook Spring Creek Preserve. Click photo for larger image. More on the story See an audio slideshow of scientists and students prospecting for dinosaur bones at the Cook Preserve in Wyoming. Discretion required to protect fossil sites

These Jurassic treasures in North America's most famous dinosaur bed are not, as one local spins it, "everywhere, like dandelions." But since at least the 1870s, prospectors and paleontologists have been finding them wherever the 150-million-year-old sediments and sandstones of the Morrison Formation jut through the surface in Wyoming, Montana and nine other Western states.

Just such an outcrop is the centerpiece of the University of Pittsburgh's new 4,700 acre Allen L. Cook Spring Creek Preserve. But unlike other known dinosaur digs and hot spots in northern and central Wyoming and along nearby Como Bluff, the preserve's Morrison sediments have never been fully explored and prospected.

Until now.

Paleontologists, instructors and students enrolled in Pitt's Honors College summer field course are taking the first dusty steps this month to determine just what Pitt bought in December of 2005 from rancher Allen Cook for the bargain basement price of $1 million -- much less than its dino-sized, $7 million appraised value.

"The paleontology, the study of evolution, the link between rock science and life sciences, is exciting," said Edward McCord, director of programming at Pitt's Honors College and coordinator of the Cook preserve. "And the most exciting thing is the prospecting. It's like treasure hunting. You never know what will be out there. There's risk and uncertainty and discovery."

The uncertainty part of that is displayed on the field course's first scheduled day of prospecting when a late spring storm blowing across the high plains of southeastern Wyoming drops rain and a dusting of snow, and topples six empty tractor-trailers on the interstate near Cheyenne with 88-mile-per-hour wind gusts. The day's prospecting is cancelled.

Into dinosaur country
At 7:30 a.m. the next morning there is still windowpane ice on the puddles of the Longhorn Lodge, where Pitt has established its field course headquarters in Rock River -- population 235 -- a village that straddles U.S. Route 30 like an old work saddle.

There's a restaurant attached to the seven log-sided cabins of the Longhorn, and a general store across the way where the coffee's always on and the price is whatever change you want to slip into the jar. A vacant building separates the general store from the Double Shot Bar where a three-toed dinosaur footprint in a desk-sized block of sandstone is displayed out front, next to a sign asking patrons not to park blocking the tavern's "Drive-Up Service" window.

Mandela Lyon, a paleobiologist from the University of Pennsylvania and one of the instructors of the summer course, planned to start students prospecting on an exposure of the Morrison Formation in the northeast portion of the preserve where, over the last couple of years, a number of articulated and associated dinosaur bones have been found. (Articulated bones are linked together; associated bones are simply from the same animal.)

"Then over the course of day," she said, "we will work our way slowly down and through that section in hopes of prospecting a section that still contains dinosaur bearing rocks but that hasn't been explored in a long time."

The temperature warms into the 70s and puddles are mostly dried by 11 a.m. when the caravan of five SUVs pulls out of the Longhorn lot onto on the two-lane blacktop heading north, paralleling the main line of the Union Pacific Railroad, which often seems busier than the highway. On both sides of the road, broad, rolling pastures stretch out across the valley bottom to the Laramie Mountains in the east and the snow-capped Medicine Bow Mountains in the west.

After just a couple of miles, the caravan turns off the pavement onto a dirt road. Pronghorn antelope mix and mingle with horses and cattle behind the barbed wire fences that parallel the road on both sides. Several golden eagles take feeding positions on the fence posts. Sentinels in prairie dogs towns whistle warnings.

The vehicles bounce through a deep roadside ditch, moving off-road along a rutted one-lane tire track through a rocky pasture of bunch grass and spring sweet sage. Another turn and the caravan is on a bent grass trail over a small ridge where it stops on a rolling, gullied, north-facing slope under a wide sky so heavy with blue it seems to push down the horizon. Dinosaur country.

Out of the vehicles, the students apply suntan lotion and insect repellent to ward off blood-sucking ticks, then gather for practical prospecting advice around Ms. Lyon and Kelli Trujillo, another field course instructor. She's the University of Wyoming paleontologist, who in 1999 confirmed the presence of dinosaur fossils and the rare convergence of Morrison, Sundance and Cloverly formation outcrops -- all of which contain fossils -- on the Cook Ranch property.

Moving fast
Ms. Lyon hands out rolls of red-striped ribbon to the students "to mark dinosaur bones for future investigation" if they find any. Ms. Trujillo urges them to keep in sight of one another. It's a nearly impossible task given the many gullies, nooks and crannies on the sloping anticline -- a convex or bulging geologic hill created by the compression and folding of sedimentary layers of sand and mud stones laid down in ancient rivers, lakes and floodplains.

Ms. Trujillo, who wears a leather holster belt holding a rock hammer, and geologist's compass, tells them that if they find "float" -- the term for loose fossils individually scattered over the ground by water erosion -- they should look up the slope to find the possible source and tie a ribbon there. Ms. Lyon and several students carry global positioning system devices for recording the position of potentially significant discoveries that might merit future investigation and even digging.

"And if you need to get someone's attention, shouting 'COO-EEE' can work," demonstrates the strong-voiced Ms. Trujillo, who also sings and plays mandolin for the Wyoming country-goth band, Jalan Crossland. "That can carry a long way, even in this wind."

Ms. Lyon leads the group to a nearby dusty slope to point out a string of six, cantaloupe-sized vertebrae lying in a row near where a limb bone at least four feet long is sticking into the ground. The bones, probably from a sauropod -- a large, long-necked plant-eating dinosaur -- are lying loose on the surface in a natural pattern that suggests the animal's skeleton and promises that more of the creature may lie below.

The site is less than 10 miles south of Como Bluff, where the nearly complete skeleton of Diplodocus carnegii, a sauropod later nicknamed "Dippy," was discovered by Carnegie Museum scientists and prospectors in 1899. It remains the highlight of the museum's extensive collection and the centerpiece of the ongoing $36 million renovation of Dinosaur Hall, scheduled to reopen in November.

Although the Como Bluff area has been heavily prospected and quarried for its big dinosaur fossils since the 1870s, the preserve has been largely untouched for the last century, defended by barbed wire and sometimes bullets, while part of one of the world's largest ranches. Mr. Cook was only the fourth owner of the land in the last century.

"There's no pattern and no way to know where they might be until you go walking over the ground," Ms. Trujillo said, advising them to stick to the green and purple soils of the Morrison Formation. Although rattlesnakes are common around Como Bluff, she tells the group, not one has been found on the preserve -- a blessing she attributes to its higher elevation of between 6,600 an 6,700 feet. Some of the students are relieved, others skeptical.

Some are, some aren't
The students, instructors, and several paleontologists who have been invited to prospect the site, fan out over outcrops of rock and grassy knolls, through gullies and dry washes. They stop often to look at, pick up and turn over rocks. For three hours it is a scene out of one of those "Family Circus" cartoons that trace the wandering routes of distracted children, except that these meanderers carry rock hammers on their belts.

The sun is hot and the wind does not pause for breath as it moves quickly across the stark, treeless landscape. Necks begin to sunburn, and gritty bits of Wyoming accumulate in hair, ears, mouths and searching eyes.

"The trouble is that rocks are made out of the same stuff as the fossils and the two are not always distinguishable," said Jim Siegwarth, a 73-year-old retired physicist and active bone hunter from Boulder, Colo., who has removed more than 700 numbered sauropod, theropod and stegosaur bones from a quarry near Como Bluff since 1990.

"What you've got there," he said with a grin, pointing to a cup-sized stone picked up by one of the searchers, "is probably leverite, as in 'leave her right there, it ain't no good."

Mr. Siegwarth, who is well known among dinosaur fossil aficionados, said the fossilized bones are distinguishable by their fibrous-looking surface, like petrified wood. Those fibers or lines are created when the bone's organic material is washed out over time by water and replaced by dissolved minerals, usually silicas, or sometimes, as in the Como Bluff land preserve, traces of uranium. Those minerals preserve the structure of the bone by filling in the gaps.

Matt Lamanna, Carnegie Museum of Natural History assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology and an adjunct professor in Pitt's Geology and Planetary Science Department, moves quickly from one rocky blue-green or white outcrop to another, striding quickly, head moving from side to side, eyes focused on the ground, enjoying the search.

"I'm going with the fast method of prospecting, looking for big chunks," Mr. Lamanna said. "If I see something I'll get down on my hands and knees and look in more detail. But in an area that hasn't been prospected before, whoever covers the most ground usually wins."

Mr. Lamanna, who has led field research projects in China, Argentina and Egypt, said the Cook preserve reestablishes the link between Wyoming and the Carnegie, which owes its fame in large measure to fossils from the area.

"It's really cool privilege to be continuing that legacy of field work out here. Hopefully we'll find new stuff that will find its way to the exhibit halls and into scientific literature," he said.

While the 19th century's bone hunters went after the biggest fossils and discarded the rest, Spring Creek's undisturbed rock strata could well contain lots of undiscovered species, as well as new information about the Jurassic flora, fauna and environment.

"The story isn't written yet on the Morrison," Mr. Lamanna said. "An eighth of all the Morrison dinosaurs have been found since 2000. so there's definitely more out here. I think the biggest advances are to be made in small fauna, small dinosaurs and non-dinosaurian mammals and reptiles. I'm hoping our team can pull one of those out."

By day's end, several bone "floats" have been discovered by students, and a large embedded bone with just a football-sized end exposed has been found by Terry J. Meehan, an animal biologist and paleontologist at Chatham University and research assistant at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History who stopped by the Pitt preserve while on a summer tour of Western dinosaur digs.

Prospecting shares time with field classes over the next two days. Using a compass, tape measure and blue yarn, the students and instructors lay out a 9 meter by 14 meter grid on the slope where the big connected sauropod vertebrae sit on the surface. Eventually they will quarry the site, digging down to discover how much of the animal remains together underground, but first they get down on knees, bellies and butts to pick and bag the "float" from a single square meter of the surface before moving on to the next.

Included in the sauropod float are the teeth of one or more therapods -- meat-eating dinosaurs related to today's birds -- that may have scavenged and eaten the dying sauropod.

"The surface is interesting for what it tells us about how the animals lived and died and what may have eaten them," said Ms. Lyon. "But what's underground, either a bone bed or the associated bones of an entire animal, may be more exciting."

The next day, prospecting moves to another part of the preserve where the students search the Morrison and find more associated "float," and another big, protruding bone. In a previously identified outcrop of the Cloverly Formation they see thousands of belemnites, a common, bullet-shaped fossil from an extinct group of marine cephalopods, similar to the modern squid or cuttlefish.

"This field work is a huge part of paleontology and we're doing a lot of different types," said Ryan Felice, a Tulane University junior from New Jersey majoring in ecology and evolution. "It's like being given a paleontology menu so I can see what I really like."

Mr. Meehan, walked the property for three days said its value as a site for scientific training is "fabulous."

"There's a lot of land and a lot of fossils. They'll be able to work it literally forever," Mr. Meehan said. "We've only worked the equivalent of one long day if you add up the hours we've spent here and we found what? Six long patches of bone. It's hard to ask for better than that."

Preserve's added value
For all its historic and scientific significance for paleontologists, Mr. McCord said, the Spring Creek Preserve's biggest value may prove to be the opportunities it provides Pitt to broaden it intellectual reach in the West and collaborate with a variety of institutions and individuals.

"We have paleontology and native American archeology sites, and ecological issues related to the west and water, so right off the bat we get these educational opportunities," Mr. McCord said. "But the history of settlement in the West, its politics and attitudes, its views on environmental issues, are dramatically different than what we see in the East."

He said the field course can provide students with opportunities to get a greater feel, a greater understanding of Western attitudes and challenges as participant observers, and could be expanded to include a writing, arts and humanities component. the preserve also presents an opportunity for further collaboration with The Carnegie, the University of Wyoming and other colleges and universities.

"This year is the pilot project. These students are on the frontier, not just on the surface of the land but also on the frontier of the institutional program," Mr. McCord said. "This property is looked at as a gift of land with science assets, but the land is just an anchor for people coming together from different places and specialties. The big yield from the property is not dinosaur bones, but rather the wonderful opportunities."

But speaking of dinosaur bones, what about the failure of prospectors to hit a Dippy-sized home run?

"It's not always easy to find a big head sticking out of the ground," Ms. Lyon said. "We really won't know what we have until we start digging. Call us back later in the summer."

-->