In a remote red rock canyon near what is now Canyonlands National Park, Utah's first documented dinosaur fossil discovery occurred 165 years ago this week.
- This is "Old News," our weekly dig into Utah's past.
Reality check: Indigenous people across North America were well aware of fossils long before the U.S. government sent white people to poke around the desert.
- Oral tradition and archeology passed down creation stories that explain prehistoric life and extinction, writes Stanford science historian Adrienne Mayor. Fossils also appear in ancient art and tools .
Flashback: Geologist John Newberry was part of a U.S. Army expedition to explore the area around the Colorado River in 1859, when, on Aug. 17, he noticed some massive bones in the sandstone walls of a canyon.
- They once belonged to a Dystrophaeus viaemalae , an early sauropod — i.e. the ginormous long-necked plant-eaters, like brachiosaurus and apatosaurus.
- The name, meaning "Bad bones, bad way," was later given to reflect the difficult-to-reach site where the fossils were discovered.
What they said: The team was fascinated by the "old petrified monster ... whose gigantic bones are our wonder," expedition engineer Charles Dimmock wrote in his diary .
Oops: Newberry and his expedition leader, John N. Macomb, thought the animal was an ichthyosaurus — a sharklike marine reptile from an earlier era.
- But they didn't get a good look at its face; Dystrophaeus is estimated to have been more than 40 feet long, and they only had light hand tools.
What they did: The team hauled some hunks of its front leg out of the labyrinthine cliffs and sent them to the Smithsonian.
- "The special object of our efforts, the head, was not reached, but still remains to reward some future geologist who shall visit this interesting locality." Newberry later wrote .
The intrigue: That took more than a century, because the fossils were shipped around and largely forgotten — along with the exact location of Newberry's dig.
Catch up quick: In the 1970s, a Moab historian and naturalist, Fran Barnes, searched the unpublished diaries and notes from Macomb's expedition, and, in 1989, refound the Dystrophaeus' final resting place .
Why it matters: Paleontologists found that the site is deeper and older than most of Utah's other renowned dino graveyards — and Newberry's Dystrophaeus remains the earliest sauropod ever found in North America.
- That has big implications for how dinosaurs traveled, evolved and diversified, state scientists wrote .
Fun fact: Coincidentally, Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species" just three months after Newberry spotted ol' Bad Bones.
Previously in "Old News"
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