Fossil Find
I had the opportunity to take a geologist buddy of mine out for a day of rock hounding. Specifically I had taken him a sample of a rock that I had found that he thought may be a diamond indicator. Since the area I was hiking in was a known diamond area he decided he would like to see for himself in order to put the rock in context. I was tickled pink thinking I had made some great discovery. We decided a trip was in order and we made our way into the badlands area in Southwest Wyoming and I took him to the spot of the find. After a few minutes, he dashed my hopes of riches after deciding it was actually a fragment of an ancient stream bed. Oh well, my dreams of owning a diamond mine vanished. I next took him to a spot in an old creek bed that contained some fossil bones that I had photographed. It was very cool having him there identifying the bits and pieces of bones. The Eocene period here was flush with creatures long gone, rhinos, tapirs, turtles, alligators and more.
On our way out of the creek bed my friend mentioned how nice it would be to find a big bone. A couple hundred yards later I decided to cut across a small embankment on the way back to the truck and wham!…I spot the end of a bone protruding from the remains of an older Eocene creek bed. The bone was big. As he walked up I nonchalantly said “look at this”…he stepped up and examined it and just said “oh my.” In the end it turned out to be about 1/3 of a right humerus. It was massive and took a couple of days of careful picking to extract. Thankfully we were on private land otherwise I would have had to leave it there for the elements to reclaim…but that’s a different rant for another time. It turns out that it belongs to a Uintathere. A 6 horned beast around 35 million years old. I love Wyoming…will post more pics later
This article was written by timchilcott