Friday, July 20, 2007


Jul. 20, 2007 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) --
New discoveries about the rise of dinosaurs might not have been made were it not for a group of hikers looking for something to do one scorching morning in the summer of 2002.

That day, members of an Elderhostel educational program at Ghost Ranch were growing frustrated because drought and fire danger had closed the Santa Fe and Carson National Forests and confined them to the ranch.

'We were trying to make the best of a bad situation,' the group's leader, John Hayden, recalled in an interview Thursday.

Hoping to cheer the hikers, Hayden suggested that, after lunch, they venture down a nearby creek that fed into Abiquiu Lake. There, he said, 'maybe we can find a dinosaur or two.'

Near the creek bank the group found exposed Triassic Chinle rock formations. Not long after, Hayden recalled Thursday, 'By golly, one of the old-timers that was with me reached down and said, 'I think I found something.' ''

What the hiker found sure looked like a fossil bone.

After he followed Hayden's instruction and performed the 'lick test' -- fossil bones will absorb moisture and stick to the tongue -- the group realized it had stumbled onto something truly prehistoric.

Scattered at their feet were scores of dinosaur and other fossil bones that had tumbled down from the sloping rock formation above.

The hikers marked the site with a pile of rocks and a tree branch and hurried back to Ghost Ranch to announce what they had found.

Tons of dinosaur bones had been found in and around the ranch before, including a Coelophysis dinosaur fossil in 1881.

But subsequent excavations of what became known as the Hayden Quarry turned up hundreds of bones that led to a research discovery to be announced today: that dinosaurs and dinosaurlike creatures coexisted for tens of millions of years.

Hayden, 67, is retired from the U.S. Forest Service and lives near Edgewood. His passion is archaeology, but he has always dabbled in paleontology, having once been neighbors with amateur paleontologist Ruth Hall.

Hayden is modest about his discovery: 'The only credit I can get from that is knowing the difference between rock and bone. Life is fun, isn't it ?'

Newstex ID: KRTB-0010-18293559


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