Once a rock wears away enough to expose a fossil, the specimen starts to erode with it. The bureau was tasked with finding a suitable scientific outfit to collect the fossils before nature disposed of them. Their report made its way to the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the land and any fossils found on it on behalf of the federal government. In the early 1990s, amateur fossil hunters noticed an odd protrusion in the Utah rock. An additional 65 million years passed and humans arrived on the planet.įossilization demands such specific conditions that, at best estimate, less than 0.1% of all living things end up preserved this way. “Like the way I like to sip a good wine.”Ībout 85 million years after this stegosaurus fossilized, the last dinosaurs went extinct. “I take my time,” said paleontologist Luis Chiappe, gently brushing ancient dust from a tibia with a hardware store paintbrush. Nature takes at least 10,000 years to make a fossil.
Get sloppy with the chisel and a few priceless eons of natural history could crumble under your work gloves. The dinosaur’s remains are more vulnerable during excavation than at any point since the animal died 150 million years ago. The relentless clank-clank of hand chisels knocking away ancient sandstone can ring in your ears long after you’ve set down the hammer and hiked back to camp.īut the closer the bones get to the surface, the quieter a quarry gets. A fossil quarry is deafeningly loud when the jackhammers and rotary hammers are going. A dental scaler, that hook-ended metal tool a dentist uses to chip away plaque, makes the exact same sound against a stegosaurus femur that it does on a human tooth.
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