BuiltWithNOF
Dry Mesa Quarry

       Dry Mesa was the collossus of his work, the most productive site in the 20th century after Barnum Brown has finished his work early in the century. This image shows one of the more extravagent specimen’s from the quarry, the foreleg of one of the giant sauropods. I lost track as He seemed to have done since he improperly named at least on. But whatever, he took this same leg and had it suspended from a derrick to create the impression that it was freestanding. These images found their way into international advertising for 15 years. It showed up inthe late in full-pages taken out by IBM.
 

       To tell the story of Dry Mesa in any detail would require several volumes. It was an enormously productive site, yielding a wide range of genera, some new, other familiar.   I heard it described at one time as a a back-water sort of place in a large river where the main flow which was substantial enough to roll large pieces of dinosaur and so on along decelerated at which time the detritus was deposited.  One the bone layer was opened, they were piled helter skelter on each other. There were few articulated anythings. Most of the chunks lying about in that pile are bone. Eddie and Vivian Jones are sitting on the left side of the picture looking at a mess of three large limb bones. The bone is sound but they are shattered. To complicate the process of removing them, the three are lying one end under, one end over each other so it is impossible to cleanly remove just one. I imagine that what he did was the plaster the entire pile of the three bones and then cut it in half with a rock saw. Then in the lab when the packages were opened, they would be in a controlled setting where records and maps could be kept to show relationships so that each bone could be reconstucted.
     The articulate tail segment behind dad is one of the few articulated things in the entire bone pile. I don’t have specific dimensions of the quarry but remember that it was at least the length of a football field that particular summer. There were bone piles like this scattered along the entire length of the quarry so it was impossible to recover all of the bones. In that case dad and crew covered the remaining bones with heavy plastic, then shoveled sand and dirt on top of the plastic, and finally a D-5 Cat walked along finishing the job. The objective was to cover bones too deeply for rock hounds to get to them.

              

Ultrasaurus

Supersaurus

Eddie & Vivian Jones

Jack McIntosh

 Japanese Film Makers

 

[DINOSAUR JIM] [THE MAN] [QUARRIES] [GALLERIES] [HARVARD] [BYU] [ESC] [Dry Mesa Quarry] [Projects] [RECOGNITIONS] [Movies-TV productions] [BYU Controversy] [Miscellanea]