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Eons In The Palm Of My Hand
A rare find in the prehistoric bosom of McElmo Canyon
It was the proverbial "end of the day" - a winter pilgrimage into moonscape lands of rock and barren soils in search of petroglyph panels. There are many up McElmo Canyon, west of Cortez, Colo., and on this blustery, frigid day we were fortunate to find some vibrant Kokopelli's etched upon the blackened sandstone boulders that had separated and fallen from the red mesa cliffs above. Enough to warm the coldest soul.
The sun cast faint, long shadows as we headed for the car around 3:00 p.m. It would set within an hour. I had just snapped off some pictures of a rock monolith that stood on end. I took a couple of steps and looked down to see the strangest looking rock-like form I'd ever spied. It was smooth and gleaming, in stark contrast to the drab dirt and dark rock that surrounded it. The oval wonder filled the palm of my hand and had the heft of what I'd expect of a very hard rock that size. It looked as if it had just jumped out of the polishing machines that rock hounds use.
I handed my find to my archaeologist friend. Oh my gosh, she said. It's a gastrolith. That's gastro, as in stomach; lith, as in stone. Aka, gizzard stone. Then the punch line: this fist-sized wonder came from the insides of a dinosaur who had swallowed it to aid in digestion. In fact, not too far away an archaeologist had once come upon a pile of them in the shape of the dinosaur's innards.
I was stunned. I felt as though I'd come across a version of the holy grail, made even more shocking by the fact that I rarely find things on the ground because I'm a birder. I'm always looking up to the sky or into trees. But there weren't any trees on these empty lands. Just rock and dirt, and a magical, grey-brown gizzard stone.
I went home and did what any inquisitive person would have done: I Googled. To be a gastrolith it needed to be found in an area where there were no other rocks like it. Check. My first hit had been that it was other worldly, as in meteor. Second, a gastrolith had to be highly polished and rounded, because, according to Wikipedia, "inside a dinosaur's gizzard any genuine gastrolith would have been acted upon by other stones and fibrous materials in a process similar to the action of a rock tumbler." In addition, there had to be little or no polish in the depressions. Check. The dimples were as dull as can be.
Gastroliths are often found near other dino bones. I saw no other signs of a dinosaur, but a gastrolith are doesn't always stay inside the gizzard. Having tumbled for years in the digestive tracts they were also expelled in dino dung. The pictures were the final confirmation. My find was the real deal.
The Four Corners area is one of the most archeologically rich in the world. It is laden with ancient Indian ruins and surrounded by major dinosaur digs - the famous Morrison formation up by Denver and Dinosaur Monument straight north. A few miles from the mouth of McElmo Canyon, the remains of two large dinosaurs were found in 1900 by an American Museum of Natural History expedition.
I reckon that this gastrolith came from an Armored Stegosaurus, a bus-sized herbivore with small teeth that browsed on the mosses, ferns, conifers and fruits that once covered these desert lands. A tropical, cycad-covered landscape of 155 million years ago. She had two rows of tall spikes upon her back, thus her name that translates as "roof lizard." She could walk on two or four legs and could have grown to 14 feet tall and 30 feet long. And, she swallowed gastroliths, unlike other dinosaurs of this region.
Several years ago, I witnessed palm tree-like cycads on a friend's farm in Zimbabwe. I could only sit and stare at the pre-historic hillside that climbed before me. It was as if I'd stepped from a time machine. It's easy to forget that Colorado and the Intermountain West was once Jurassic Park. Easy, that is, until one wanders upon a stone that looks like none other. A portal into pre-human times when the arid West was wet and oozed with green. When dinosaur tails swung brawny and broad, and rocks rolled 'round the belly.
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