Yesterday I spent the morning on a tour of the Trail Through Time, an area within McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area that is riddled with 150 million year old dinosaur fossils. I had been out to this trail before, and despite the interpretive signs, I still had difficulty identifying the fossils. With the help of Zeb Miracle, our tour guide, seeing the bones was much easier.We saw vertebrae from the neck of a Camarasaurus dinosaur. Just a section of the neck bones was about 20 feet long! The bones embedded in the rock have a slightly grayer color and are smoother than the rest of the rock. The best part was that, unlike in a museum, we were allowed to touch the fossils to get a sense of the size of these creatures.
We learned that this area of the Colorado desert, now known as Rabbit Valley, was once a lush wetland where dinosaurs and other animals came to drink. It’s hard to imagine that this dry desert was a jungle millions of years ago!
