Mission
to Hell Creek: bringing home the bones (the hard way)
Diary
of a dino-dig in Montana's Hell Creek Formation.
The Hell Creek Formation snakes along jagged, mud-caked buttes in eastern
Montana and the Dakotas in a land where highways turn into dirt and wooden
road signs are straight out of "Road Runner" cartoons.
It's summer, 1995, and the temperatures range from gasping dry-hot afternoons of 115 degrees to rainy evenings in the low 40s. Cattle ranchers make a good living here, as do antelope, mule deer, rattlesnakes and the odd scorpion.
An Albertosaur preparing to chomp the remains of a tasty Triceratops, as might have happened 65 million years back, at the UW Triceratops dig. Courtesy of Rick Spears.
So what would draw a van-load of journalists to such punishing terrain? The fact that it's one of the premier stomping grounds of the Cretaceous Era, the last hurrah of the Dinosaur Age that ended about 65 million years ago.
Courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum, six scribblers were about to feel what it's like to comb Cretaceous crud for remnants of flesh-ripping, horn-wielding behemoths like Albertosaurus, Triceratops and the undisputed king of gore, Tyrannosaurus rex.
The UW crew had been working this site, about 30 miles west of Ekalaka, Mont., for several years. In summer 1994, they had hit the mother lode. Crew co-leader Craig Pfister spotted an exposed piece of bone the size of an apple core at the base of a butte, and carefully began digging. And digging. And digging. He quickly realized he was on to something rare and important: The skull of a T. rex, nearly six feet long.
For a few days, we will assume the sweaty, dirt-caked M.O. of the paleontologist. Our hosts run a bare-bones operation, requiring them to be part intuitive scientist, part survivalist, part cartographer, part coal miner, part sculptor and part pack mule.
Make that several parts pack mule.
