FRUITA – Marc Jones has studied from half a world away some of the animals that trod Earth some 150 million years ago in what is now western Colorado.
Last week, he and more than 50 other paleontologists from around the world got to dig into the Morrison Formation with their own tools, brush away the greenish clay-like soils and peer back into what Earth looked like eons ago.
“This is one of the places where you can get a handle on the entire ecosystem” of those times when dinosaurs and myriad other creatures trod, stomped, burrowed and otherwise inhabited Earth, said Jones, who traveled from the University of Adelaide in Australia to study the native lands and rock of the animals he studies.
In particular, he is studying the eilenodon, a smaller creature of the late Jurassic period 200 million years ago and likely a relative of the tuatara, an order of reptiles of which only two species remain.
For Jones, eilenodon is of particular interest because it appears to be a distant forebear of the tuatara, a reptile endemic to New Zealand.
The fossil remains suggest it was more herbivore than carnivore. The tiny creature with a head about 10 centimeters long is intriguing because “it was a reptile acting like a mammal,” Jones said.
For Susannah Maidment, a paleontologist with Imperial College in London, the trip to western Colorado marked a first visit to the Morrison, the layer of earth in which she specializes.
An expert on the stegosaurus, one of the best-known denizens of the Morrison, she will follow outcrops of the Morrison from Montana south with her husband and 1-year-old daughter in tow.
The Morrison, she said, might seem like a simple formation, but it was deposited over a 10 million-year period, leading her to work on correlating the kinds of animals found at different levels within the formation, shedding new light on the late Jurassic.
The visit by paleontologists from around the world does a bit more than offer the opportunity to view the native rock in which many of the fossils they study have been found, said ReBecca Hunt-Foster, who organized the event, which included lectures at Dinosaur Journey in Fruita and visits to other parts of the Dinosaur Diamond.
“It’s nice to show the Morrison off to other people,” Hunt-Foster said.
