Plumbata
Bronze Member
Just before a heinous blizzard struck here in Wyoming I decided to alleviate the anticipated cabin-fever by checking out a hillside garbage dump where I've found relics and bottles exposed on the surface in the past. It seems to date from the 1920s-50s which isn't usually too exciting, but due to the wide surface scatter of the old trash and sparse vegetation interesting things can be exposed by wind and rain right on the surface of the ground.
I found a machine-made cork-top Ink bottle which was left behind, and spied a 1940s Elgin wristwatch body on top of some burrowing critter's mound but had no luck eyeballing coins or anything of true interest, until I walked past a very strange rock sitting perfectly on top of the ground. As I was stooping for the piece I realized it was a vertebra segment, and once its density was confirmed in-hand I realized it was a petrified dinosaur bone!
Here it was about 15 seconds after picking it up (had to share the surprise discovery with my dad), it was essentially perfectly exposed and must've been sitting there for years:
Now at this point any thinking man would be wondering what a fossilized dinosaur bone would be doing in a location devoid of any fossiliferous strata, and I recalled that in the same general area several years ago I had found a bullet-shaped belemnite fossil from an extinct squid-like creature which was very strange and attributed to someone picking it up somewhere as a curiosity and tossing it after getting home. Well, now that I had 2 very different fossils from the dump I realized that someone's fossil collection must have been thrown away 70+ years ago! To try to prove the theory I shifted eyeball-gears and scanned the area for unusual non-dolomite fragments, and quickly confirmed the theory by finding a dark mudstone sort of rock saturated with fossil bivalve shells, though years of exposure had degraded it to the point of not being worth saving.
Experienced dump-diggers will confirm that occasionally very unusual things are found among the bottles we go digging for, like Indian artifacts, items that were already antiques when tossed, and unusual rocks/minerals/fossils, though this is the first time I've come across the remains of an actual collection.
And here are some pics after washing off the "bottom" (the rest was perfectly clean):
A respectable 2.12 pounds, or 962 grams:
I will definitely be going back, as there are certainly more fossils waiting to be found. If they had 1 bone they may have had multiple, or maybe some teeth! Dinosaur fossil hunting is strictly forbidden on the public lands here so this is the best I'm likely to manage; hunting for 2nd-hand dino bones!
I found a machine-made cork-top Ink bottle which was left behind, and spied a 1940s Elgin wristwatch body on top of some burrowing critter's mound but had no luck eyeballing coins or anything of true interest, until I walked past a very strange rock sitting perfectly on top of the ground. As I was stooping for the piece I realized it was a vertebra segment, and once its density was confirmed in-hand I realized it was a petrified dinosaur bone!
Here it was about 15 seconds after picking it up (had to share the surprise discovery with my dad), it was essentially perfectly exposed and must've been sitting there for years:
Now at this point any thinking man would be wondering what a fossilized dinosaur bone would be doing in a location devoid of any fossiliferous strata, and I recalled that in the same general area several years ago I had found a bullet-shaped belemnite fossil from an extinct squid-like creature which was very strange and attributed to someone picking it up somewhere as a curiosity and tossing it after getting home. Well, now that I had 2 very different fossils from the dump I realized that someone's fossil collection must have been thrown away 70+ years ago! To try to prove the theory I shifted eyeball-gears and scanned the area for unusual non-dolomite fragments, and quickly confirmed the theory by finding a dark mudstone sort of rock saturated with fossil bivalve shells, though years of exposure had degraded it to the point of not being worth saving.
Experienced dump-diggers will confirm that occasionally very unusual things are found among the bottles we go digging for, like Indian artifacts, items that were already antiques when tossed, and unusual rocks/minerals/fossils, though this is the first time I've come across the remains of an actual collection.
And here are some pics after washing off the "bottom" (the rest was perfectly clean):
A respectable 2.12 pounds, or 962 grams:
I will definitely be going back, as there are certainly more fossils waiting to be found. If they had 1 bone they may have had multiple, or maybe some teeth! Dinosaur fossil hunting is strictly forbidden on the public lands here so this is the best I'm likely to manage; hunting for 2nd-hand dino bones!
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