My Story (Very briefly...)
Lots of people claim that they wanted to be paleontologists at the age of 3. So did I. The problem is, I never really grew out of it. My third birthday party had dinosaurs. Everywhere. I grew up digging in fossil dirt from Aurora, NC, looking for coral and shark teeth. I practically lived at my local science museums (and still do, only now I get to do research, fossil preparation, and work in collections!) When local paleontologists discovered a dinosaur with a "fossilized heart" (no longer considered such) when I was little, I got to meet the man who led the work. And then, years later a dinosaur bone with soft tissue turned up. I was officially hooked. No longer was I dreaming about dinosaurs. I was actively pursuing the science behind prehistoric creatures. I didn't want to read about it, I wanted in on the action. So I started working at the museum, and finally going on my own adventures. And thus, I needed a place to share them and maybe inspire others the way I was inspired. I have gone from watching fossils be prepared from one side of the glass at the museum to working on them on the inside of the glass. I am a student working toward my goal. I can finally start to call myself a paleontologist.
Garden of the Gods reminds me a mini-Arches. But aside from the rock being so red, there isn't much similarity. The rock here is Pikes Peak granite, which during the Cretaceous was pushed up and deformed during the Laramide Orogeny, a mountain building event. Erosion then formed the rocks into how they can be seen today. 
Of course, there are other layers of rock above that granite that are eroding off the top. And those rocks, at least a smaller part of them, produced a small amount of fossils from a new species of dinosaur, called Theiophytalia. Its some type of hadrosaur. It figures that I managed to run into the one fossil in a place.
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