We’ll admit it: The average 9-year-old probably knows more about dinosaurs than we do.
As CNN explained last year: “These kids can rattle off the scientific names of dozens, if not hundreds, of dinosaurs. They can tell you what these creatures ate, what they looked like, and where they lived. They know the difference between the Mesozoic and Cretaceous periods.”
And while we confess to difficulty in merely pronouncing Mesozoic or Cretaceous, we also confess to being fascinated by the Northwest’s newfound status as a dinosaur hotbed. Well, hotbed might be too strong of a word, but it’s kind of cool that several fossils have been discovered here over the past decade.
Recently, the confirmation of two fossils have added Oregon to the list of dinosaur-producing states. Greg Retallack, a researcher at the University of Oregon, wrote in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology about the discovery of a fossilized toe bone from an ornithopod. Not being the types who regularly read the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, we were interested to learn that the fossil is about 103 million years old, from the Cretaceous period, and that an ornithopod was a 17-foot-long herbivore that weighed up to 1,500 pounds and walked on two legs.
Retallack and a team of students found the fragment in 2015 in Central Oregon and waited three years to have the discovery written up in a peer-reviewed publication. It was the first accepted fossil discovery in Oregon, and it was followed within weeks by an article from Dave Taylor about the unearthing of an 80-million-year-old vertebrae from a duck-billed hadrosaur along the Southern Oregon coast. That discovery was made in the 1960s, but only recently made its way into scientific annals.
Which brings up an important point about the world we live in. It has become a badge of honor in some circles to reject scientific findings and insist that a nefarious political agenda stands behind them. While scientists are imperfect and the quest for knowledge is continuous, real science is subjected to intense questioning and review by trained, well-informed academics who have expertise in that particular field. It’s not like anybody who “discovers” a rock on the beach and thinks it is a dinosaur fossil can write an article for a scientific publication — not even the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
In the realm of dinosaur research, this desire to bend “science” to fit our personal beliefs extends to a theory that dinosaurs and humans coexisted. In response to this canard, the U.S. Geological Survey responds: “No! After the dinosaurs died out, nearly 65 million years passed before people appeared on earth.”
Anyway, we in Washington are pleased to welcome Oregon to the roster of dinosaur states. This state’s first fossil was found in 2015 — a femur fragment from a theropod, a group of meat-eating dinosaurs that included the T. rex and Velociraptor. That made Washington the 37th state to yield a dinosaur fossil.
The reason the Northwest has been late to the dinosaur party? According to the Burke Museum in Seattle: “Dinosaurs are found in rocks from the time period in which they lived. Much of Washington was underwater during this period, so Washington has very little rock of the right age and type. Because dinosaurs were land animals, it is very unusual to find dinosaur fossils in marine rock.”
All of which we find to be interesting and educational. But our kids probably already knew that.
