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Search for dino bones yields another rare find
by nathan oster
It’s a little quieter this summer in the dinosaur graveyard located on John Ed and Gina Anderson’s Red Canyon Ranch near Shell.
Bob Simon, president of Dinosaur Safaris, estimates that more than 1,000 people visited the dig site last summer for the “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to see a nearly complete skeleton of a Camarasaurus.
“My National Geographic moment,” laughed Simon one day last week. “It was a nice thing. People just kept coming. We gave a lot of tours.”
The excavation of that dinosaur was completed late last summer. It remains in storage locally while Simon markets it to museums around the world.
“There’s been a lot of interest,” he said. “It takes time to find a good home for a dinosaur. It’s not like selling and buying a car. It takes a little more effort. It’ll go...”
These days, the camarasaurus is the farthest thing from Simon’s mind. Around June 7, he and his team of dinosaurs made another significant discovery: a juvenile sauropod, either an Apatosaurus or a Diplodocid.
“I’m leaning toward it being an Apatosaurus,” he said. “It’s a little smaller dinosaur (than the camarasaurus), more difficult to see because we can’t expose all the bones without harming them.
“It’s not as visually appealing, although it may be a more significant find because it’s a juvenile.”
The new dinosaur, which he estimates to be no more than 30 feet in length, was found in the same general area of the dig site as the diplodicus discovered in 2006 and the camarasaurus found in 2007.
Simon’s speculation about how the dinosaurs ended up in such a small area has not changed since last summer. “They died and floods brought them into this area,” he said recently. “What they had in common is that they were all protected, either by a marshy, swampy area or something. There was no scavenging at all on this one. Just like there wasn’t on the camarasaurus or the diplodicus.”
“With this one, it looks like when it floated in, it lodged in place,” he said. “This was probably about a 12-ton animal. Its legs may have been sticking in the air … and something may have pushed them over, or they just fell over in time, because they’re not where they should be; they’re behind it the body, flipped over.”
Simon is hopeful that the dinosaur will be out of the ground by the end of August. With the continued cooperation of his volunteers, Rick Skarolid and Don Pfister, and the contributions on the backhoe from Richard Michelena, it might even be sooner than that.
His volunteers are just as eager as he is.
“This is the best hole in the ground, I think, in the world for dinosaurs,” said Pfister.
For Simon, the hunt will continue, long after the new find is out of the ground.
“It’s always exciting to find a new dinosaur,” he said. “That’s why we do this.”
How much longer will he keep coming, making Shell his summer home?
“We have a lot of area out here yet that looks very, very productive,” he said. “So who knows. That’s the thing about doing this. You never know what’s here until you start digging. It’s not like treasure hunting. You truly have no clue until you start digging.
“You know what can be here, be it isolated bones or a full dinosaur. This year we have both.”
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