OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, MAY 22, 2015
Meat-eating dinosaur comes alive in imaginations
T
housands of enthusiastic children, in-
cluding me, are celebrating news this
week that a dinosaur has been discovered
in Washington state. For dino-fans, this
is akin to a preteen learning Taylor Swift
moved into a house down the block.
Spotted by chance
in 2012 on Sucia
Island in San Juan
County by two visit-
ing research associates
from the University of
Washington’s Burke
Museum — they were
looking for some-
Matt
thing else entirely —
Winters
the fossil bone came
from a theropod dino-
saur, “the group of two-legged, meat-eat-
ing dinosaurs that includes Velociraptor,
Tyrannosaurus rex and modern birds.”
See tinyurl.com/WashingtonDino for the
Burke’s write-up.
This particular animal lived and died
about 80 million years ago when dinosaurs
were as dominant on earth as we are today.
Supremely successful, they still had 14.5
million years to go before a six-mile-long
space rock speared into the ground where
Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula now sits.
So how is it that we aren’t all tripping
over dinosaur fossils? Washington and
Oregon were under the ocean then. We
have oodles and oodles of ancient sea-
shells, but little evidence of large animals
from tens of millions of years ago. Soon
after its death, the individual represented
by the Burke fossil might have been swept
by waves or carried by scavengers into off-
shore sediments, which eventually solidi-
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exorable and ongoing repositioning of our
planet’s crustal plates carried the land now
comprising the San Juan Islands to where
they are today.
Washington becomes the 37th state
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Oregon’s status is unclear. The John Day
Fossil Beds National Monument, the
state’s best known pre-human site, dates
from only 45 million years ago, long af-
ter the dinosaurs faced their armageddon.
But in 1995, OPB reported excavation of
a possible “duck-billed” dinosaur, a hadro-
saurid, at Cape Sebastian in the southwest-
ern corner of the state. A paleontologist
named David Taylor collected the fossil
but apparently never prepared a formal
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publication. This specimen’s whereabouts
are unknown.
Photo courtesy of the Burke Museum
A fossil fragment recovered from a seashore in San Juan County, Wash., sits beside a casting of a complete left thigh fossil from
the same group of dinosaurs, which included Tyrannosaurus rex. Scientists were able to determine the complete femur from the
specific animal represented by the fragment would have been slightly smaller than a full-sized T. rex.
Penny Higgins photo
The bone cabin at Como Bluff, constructed from dinosaur fossil fragments from a
famous nearby deposit, is a Wyoming landmark.
The John
Day Fossil
Beds National
Monument dates
from only 45
million years ago.
bones-turned-to-stone and gastroliths we
occasionally found.
Like chickens and other domestic
poultry, plant-eating dinosaurs swallowed
rocks which they held in their gizzards to
help grind and digest coarse leaves and
stems. It’s believed that dinosaurs vomit-
ed them up when they became too smooth
to be effective, as birds do. In a desert set-
ting, these gastroliths stand out like Easter
eggs scattered on a beige carpet. We could
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it’s possible some were just random glacial
pebbles Dad said were dinosaur gizzard
stones in order to give me a victory.
źźź
Dinosaurs were my go-to topic for
kindergarten smalltalk. One of my
friends recalled decades later that mem-
Photo courtesy of the Burke Museum
bers of our gang were impressed with The shore where the fossil was found is on the southwest tip of Sucia Island State
how pretty the ladies were in a Playboy Park, part of the San Juan Islands in northwest Washington state.
magazine he purloined from his dad’s
collection and brought for show-and-
tell — taking no special notice that they
were wearing fewer clothes than grown-
up mommas usually wore. But we were
all wild about dinosaurs and I could then
rattle off their names better than I can
today.
Growing up in Wyoming, having dino-
saurs around was a familiar part of life, es-
pecially in a family headed by a semi-pro-
fessional geologist. No trip to Laramie was
complete without a visit to the Geological
Museum and its life-size, copper-plated T.
rex. On the way, we passed Como Bluff,
where an entire cabin is constructed from
fossil fragments blasted out of a nearby
hill. In the late-19th century, competing
collectors raced to recover some of the
best dinosaur specimens known up until
Illustration courtesy of PLOS ONE, modified by the Burke Museum
that time — taking many shortcuts and
wasting examples that would be treasured The first dinosaur fossil described from Washington state is a portion of the femur
(thigh bone) from a theropod dinosaur. The detailed illustration shows the fourth tro-
if found today. (My former colleague Tom chanter highlighted in blue.
Rea details this intriguing story in “Bone
Wars,” one of several books about the church and watched football on Sundays, — after picnicking on fried chicken. Little
Como dinosaurs.)
we headed for the mountains and desert did we know we were eating the distant
While other 1960s families went to to hunt fossils, crystals and arrowheads descendants of the gigantic beasts whose
źźź
I only ever found a couple of unambig-
uous fossilized dinosaur bones, both in a
small, odd-colored deposit eroding out of
a hillside near what we used to call Johnny
Lee’s Corner. The best was a knuckle bone
the size of a small cantaloupe that went
astray somewhere along my migration
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shelf in my boyhood bedroom. Partly tint-
ed vivid red by mineral deposits, I imag-
ined it still surrounded by bright blood in-
side a living creature, perhaps hunting for
a little mammal such as myself.
For me, these early experiences meant I
never harbored illusions about the perma-
nence or entitlement of humanity. We live in
a world where the eons turn ocean bottoms
into mountaintops, and pieces of mighty
monsters become knickknacks for small
boys. In a universe where nothing ever real-
ly goes to waste, the air we breathe and the
canned peas we have for dinner contain un-
countable millions of atoms that once were
parts of Velociraptors. The persistence of
life is as reassuring as it is humbling.
— MSW
Matt Winters, editor and publisher of the
Chinook Observer and Coast River Business
Journal, lives in Ilwaco, Wash., with his wife and
daughter.
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