"STOP STOP STOP! NOT EVERYONE HAS A WATER BUFFALO!!"
Well, not everyone has an Allosaurus either. (If that joke was just completely unknown to you, continue reading anyway, its not that big of a deal.)
Once upon a time, there was a quarry.
And that quarry had a lot of dinosaur bones.
Not just a lot. An excessive number of dinosaur bones. To the point that the poor professor in charge didn't know what to do with them all, nor did he have the funding to excavate everything himself.
This was CLDQ under Stokes and Madsen in the 1960's.
Seeing that there was more work than they were able to handle alone, they contacted museums and universities around the world. They made a deal with them; any institution that was willing to send excavators and money would be rewarded with a composite, mountable dinosaur. Some bones would be casts, but in general they would have a dinosaur.Technically, this was selling dinosaur bones. And it was illegal then (and even more so now.) However, because everyone was getting dinosaurs, no one really cared to press charges or anything.
I should add that this is no longer the practice at CLDQ and hasn't been in a very, very long time.
Anyway, in the visitors center, we have a map of everywhere that our fossils went. And honestly, I have to say that I was a little bit disappointed and a little bit proud.If you'll notice, our museum back home didn't take advantage of this. Nor did any institution in NC. However, we had a second chance to receive our very own Allosaurus.
On a day that I had some free time in the quarry, I started poking around in the old papers and files that are available to us as reading material. I love paleontology, but ever since I took a history of paleontology class freshman year, I've really come to appreciate the stories behind how our science came to be in addition to the science itself. So instead of turning to the various geology books or reading descriptions of every little tiny bone in every dinosaur, I took a break from science and poked through another file I stumbled on to. As Cleveland Lloyd has been known since the 1920's at least, it has a relatively long history. This is one of my favorite stories that I stumbled across.
In 1976, University of Utah offered for the 'low price' of about $30,000 the opportunity to go to a known allosaur site, excavate it alongside scientists, and send a cast of the dinosaur found to the museum of your choice! $10,000 were to be put toward the expedition, while the rest was meant to go to the University to hire a new paleontologist.Well, the time rolled around and a Richard Marcus had jumped at the chance. He had already paid the down payment of $10,000, and preparations for the excavation and casting and molding were made.
He had decided to send the cast to the NC Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.
But then it happened.He was found to be bankrupt, and also guilty of embezzlement. That's sort of a problem. The man found himself under arrest, and only out of prison because he was bailed out.
The problem was he could not pay the rest of the money to go on the expedition.
And honestly, neither could anyone else really. That's a lot of money now, and it was really a lot back then. No one picked up the project, and it died.
And the museum in NC, which only has one Jurassic dinosaur bone on display (which has a cool story behind it, but is honestly just a sauropod femur) and a couple of casts of pre-birds, would never receive its Allosaurus cast.
Sad day.
And that is the story of how we lost the chance to have a full skeleton from CLDQ. Twice.
No comments:
Post a Comment