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Friday, September 1, 2023

The Dinosaur Bone I Dug Up near Thermopolis, Wyoming

 Behold


The word fossil itself is from the Latin word for "dig". It was big enough to get a tag number which BS 1990. BS is short for the quarry called Beside Sauropod and 1990 means it was the 1,990th significant find there. The marker next to it shows its orientation (the right of the picture faces north) and length, which was about a foot. 

Digging for fossils is more about scraping and brushing. The soft mudstone must be carefully removed to uncover the bones. It took me about 4 hours to uncover what you see above. A few weeks after I found it, I got an email from the guide that a paleontologist had examined it, and determined it was a foot bone belonging to a Camarasaurus. 

I found it through the Wyoming Dinosaur Center's dig-for-a-day program. It cost me $150 back in June of 2021. There's no guarantee you'll find a bone; I suspect most people don't. However, nobody leaves empty-handed. I got to keep a nice baggie full of dinosaur bone fragments. There are other kinds of fossils at the site as well. 

The center's museum is excellent and has many exhibits you won't see anywhere else. Thermopolis also has a hot spring and a herd of bison roaming nearby. 


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