Beneath an unassuming hill on the sweeping property where Bennett and Jessica Bramson live lays a mystery 150 million years old. The deeper they dig into the hillside, the deeper the mystery grows.
“It’s just a big mound of bones,” Jessica says.
Dinosaur bones.
The two roll back a tarp to reveal a pit some four-feet-deep that this family, turned amateur paleontologists, painstakingly dug with spoons and brushes. Stretching across the edge of the pit, a dinosaur spine reaches deep inside the hillside, where whatever else remains of this ancient animal still lies buried under eons of silt and rock.
“If you put it all together, you can get a sense of the arc of the animal, which is just humungous,” Jessica says, pointing into the hillside. Using a paint brush, she dusts away the dirt to expose a long column of bone stabbing into the hill, maybe 45 feet past what they’ve already revealed.
“If we follow that,” she said, “we’ll probably find the vertebrae that lead to the head.”
But the head of what? That’s the question that has had paleontologists stumped.
Jessica’s son Mike Gordon, an engineering student at Colorado State University, was exploring the property in July 2006, looking for ancient fish fossils, when he made what turned out to be a stunning find. Little reddish pieces of fossil he found scattered among the scrub oak and juniper on the 38-acre property looked to him like petrified wood. But when he took it to an Aspen nature gallery owner, he told him it wasn’t wood at all. It was bone. Probably dinosaur bone.
“I kept it a secret for a very long time,” Mike said. “I didn’t want anybody going up there. I didn’t want anybody to disturb the site.”
He and his mother became self-taught paleontologists. Painstakingly sorting through the mound, they found small fragments that fit together to form what looked like ribs. Little pieces led to bigger pieces. Then they reached the spine that set their imaginations running.
“I’m always looking at the ground,” Mike said. “I’ve found some pretty strange things before, but that by far tops them all.”
What is it?
Like a scene out of “The Flintstones,” Jessica pulls out sections of dinosaur ribs from the oven in downstairs apartment of their home, the safest place they could find to store them.
“We had rib after rib,” she says.
Mike took some of these findings to the Denver Museum of Science and Nature, where the paleontologist thought it was the remains of a plesiosaur, a 200-million-year-old marine reptile that would have been a remnant from when Colorado was submerged under an inland sea.
The find piqued the interest of a Woodland Park paleontologist who studied the dig and came to a very different conclusion. Fused vertebrae at the tailbone indicated it had to be either some type of long-necked sauropod, like a camerasaur, or an allisaurus, the sharp-toothed carnivorous cousin to tyrannosaurus Rex.
“We don’t really know what it is,” said Mike Triebold, president of Triebold Paleontology Inc., which finds and prepares dinosaur fossils for museum exhibits, and owner of the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center, a museum of dinosaur finds.
Triebold believes the bones they found may represent not just one dinosaur but many animals, maybe even some prehistoric mammals, jumbled together where the landed in a riverbed.
“If you look at the way a river works, when a river turns a bend, things that are in the water get dumped on the inside edge,” Triebold said. “You get a whole bunch of different animals piled up in the river.”
Colorado’s Jurassic Park
Zach Ornitz/Aspen Daily NewsJessica Bramson brushes away dirt and rocks on her property to reveal a fossil find that is puzzling Colorado paleontologists.
The fossils appear to be remnants from the late Jurassic era, the classic age of dinosaurs. Between 144 million and 206 million years ago, Colorado had no Rocky Mountains. Dinosaurs roamed a region covered with inland seas, massive lakes, streams and creeks.
Dying creatures landed in the shale and sandstone of what is called the Morrison Formation, a gray stone found across much of Colorado and the West. The formation is home to the fossil beds known in western Colorado and Eastern Utah as the Dinosaur Diamond.
“By the time the camerasaurus was hanging out in Colorado, it was pretty dry,” said Matthew Mossbrucker, curator of the Morrison Natural History Museum in the town of Morrison, the namesake for the geologic formation.
Picture an African savanna, only without the grass, and the occasional stream crossing it. The “Jurassic skyline,” he said, was covered with ferns, horsetails, and the prehistoric relatives of ginkgo trees and Norfolk pines.
“Not unlike the Serengeti today, when things start to get dry, animals will congregate near water,” Mossbrucker said, and there the dinosaurs often died, their bodies washed into rivers, covered with sand and fossilized.
Hard work ahead
Camerasaurs, with their massive bodies, long necks and boxy heads, are the most common dinosaur found in the Morrison Formation, Mossbrucker said. One of the gems of northwest Colorado’s Dinosaur National Monument is a complete camerasaur skeleton left in a prehistoric sandbar. The number of finds has allowed scientists an unusual opportunity to compare them across the region, Mossbrucker said.
Colorado has unearthed some of the largest and smallest dinosaurs ever found. Most have been found in the deserts of western Colorado, but in addition to the find on the Bramsons’ property, ancient footprints have been found in the Maroon Bells wilderness.
“Mike should be proud that he made that discovery,” Triebold said. “It took a great deal of astute behavior to even see what was coming out and recognize what it was.”
But figuring out what it really is will take a lot more work. The Bramsons would like to see the fossils excavated and preserved by a university or museum, but they’ve had a hard time finding anyone interested. After studying the site, Triebold declined. It was just too much effort for a find that is too uncertain, he said.
“There might be a surprise one more foot into the hill, but you don’t know,” Triebold said. “The reality of this business is, you have to spend a tremendous amount of time, energy and money to find something that you think is worthwhile.”
The University of Colorado Museum of Natural History declined, too, saying it lacked the resources to handle the massive excavation, or the space to store it once they unearthed it.
The uncovered spine lies at a 45-degree angle, meaning for every foot researchers dig into the hill, they have to dig a foot down, too. Plus, Triebold said, the soft bone is surrounded by hard rock that’s more like concrete, making for a tricky excavation.
Threatened species
Every find is exciting, Triebold said, but “dinosaur bones are definitely not rare. We’ve been collecting for 20 years. We have a warehouse full of dinosaurs, and the museums want only the best.”
Jessica Bramson thinks the spine comes from is juvenile camerasaur, maybe 45 feet long. Mike prefers to think it’s an allisaurus, and although he’s not too optimistic that the skeleton can be reassembled, he believes the hill will reveal more finds that may be even better preserved.
“I honestly believe that if you keep digging, you’re going to find more dinosaurs,” he said.
The Bramsons say they just want to see these bones preserved. Jessica’s parents own the land and they want to sell it. The area is poised for subdividing, and they worry about them being left unappreciated.
“I just feel that this poor thing has been lying here 145 million years. It should be appreciated,” Jessica said. “I guess we could just bury it up and leave it, but how do you leave it once you know it’s there?”
dfrey@aspendailynews.com
