On January 21, Terry Hammer, Jr. gave a presentation on the Colorado Militia from 1861 to 1927. Around 50 people attended January’s program.

All Oral History Programs will be held at noon in the Whitman Educational Center, 248 S. Fourth Street. The programs are jointly sponsored by the Museum of Western Colorado and the Mesa County Historical Society and are free to the public.

Bring your lunch and enjoy these presentations. For more information, please contact the Loyd Files Research Library at (970) 242-0971, ext. 209.

This exhibit features a life-size, fleshed-out reconstruction of Fruitadens, one of the smallest adult dinosaurs in the world, found right here in the Grand Valley in 1976 by paleontologist (and Grand Junction resident) George Callison. Tiny adult dinosaurs are rare, and even more rare are plant-eating dinosaurs that weighed less than a house cat. Among the few smallest dinosaurs in the world only one, Fruitadens, was primarily a plant-eater that occasionally also ate insects as a dietary supplement (plants alone don’t have enough calories for a small, high-energy animal); the only other dinosaurs this small ate meat. Fruitadens is a dinosaur of world-wide significance and it was found just outside Fruita. It is a member of a group of dinosaurs called heterodontosaurids, which are known also from Europe and Asia and which have enlarged, canine-like teeth at the fronts of their jaws, despite their diet consisting mostly of plants. Fruitadens is the first heterodontosaurid found in the Morrison Formation, the layer of rock exposed in the Grand Valley and elsewhere that also has yielded skeletons of dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus.

Thanks to an exchange with the Museum of Natural History of Los Angeles County, the Museum of Western Colorado will be the first in the world to display the Fruitadens model. The exhibit explains a little about how we know what we know about the animal and some of the history of the work at the Fruita Paleontological Area, which the Bureau of Land Management co-manages with the Museum of Western Colorado and the City of Fruita.

At the unveiling Dr. George Callison will also be present to talk about the find.

Where: Dinosaur Journey Museum, 550 Jurassic Ct.; Fruita, Colorado

When: Wednesday, February 10 at 11 am

The Museum of Western Colorado received a very generous donation this week. Museum member Pat Martin donated what is believed to be a Basketmaker III (roughly AD 500) piece of pottery. Further research will be required but, right now, it is believed to be one of the oldest pieces of pottery from the area in the Museum’s collection. The large size and the fact that the piece is virtually complete is extremely rare. The pottery had been in Pat’s family for sometime and they decided the Museum would be the best place for it. We were all very excited and in shock when Pat said she wanted to donate it, and we are hard at work making room for it in the exhibit gallery.

Herb Bacon has traveled all over the United States and the world and has graciously agreed to share his adventures with us. Bring your lunch and join us for a first hand tour to the following exotic destinations:

February 9: Scotland

February 16: Alaska

March 16: Chile, Easter Island, Bolivia & Peru

March 23: Patagonia

March 30: Brazil & the Amazon River

All presentations are at Noon and are free to the public; however, donations are welcome.

Whitman Educational Center
4th and Ute, Grand Junction

Download a flyer here.

Dinosaur fans give museum welcome boost in ‘09 visitation

Fifteen months ago, the administrators in charge of Dinosaur Journey were as desperate and distraught as a Tyrannosaurus rex roaming a land filled only with ferns and cycads.

The mechanical components of the Fruita museum’s dinosaurs that allowed them to spit, hiss and growl were breaking down. The building’s stained, threadbare carpet was showing its 16-year-old age. The number of paid visitors slipped more than 5 percent from 43,600 in 2007 to 41,200 in 2008, as the recession choked off discretionary spending…

Read the whole article in The Daily Sentinel here.

Mymoorapelta was the first ankylosaur discovered in the Jurassic of North America. This dinosaur was discovered in the Morrison Formation (Brushy Basin Member) at the Mygatt-Moore Quarry, located in western Colorado’s Rabbit Valley. It represented a totally new group of dinosaurs in the Morrison Formation, one that hadn’t been found in this rock unit in 125 years of previous work! Mymoorapelta was covered in bony armor and had sharp spines along its body. This defensive armor included a shield over the pelvis and two rings of bone around the upper half of its neck, just behind the skull. The fossils of Mymoorapelta collected at the Mygatt-Moore Quarry are curated and on display at Dinosaur Journey Museum. This Jurassic ankylosaur is currently being studied by Dr. Jim Kirkland (the Utah State Paleontologist) and our paleontologists at Dinosaur Journey.

References:

Kirkland, J. I. and Carpenter,  K. 1994. North America’s first pre-Cretaceous ankylosaur (Dinosauria) from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation of western Colorado. Brigham Young University Geology Studies 40:25-42

Kirkland, J. I., Carpenter, K., Hunt, A. P., and Scheetz, R. D. 1998. Ankylosaur (DInosauria) specimens from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation. Modern Geology 23:145-177.

Foster, John. 2007. “Gargantuan to Minuscule: The Morrison Menagerie, Part II”. in Jurassic West: The Dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation and Their World. Indiana University Press: 214-216.

Any material in our collections are covered under a permit though the appropriate agency and curated at the Museum of Western Colorado, unless otherwise noted.

If you didn’t get a chance to see the exhibit yet, check out the article with photos here that was in the January 22nd Grand Junction Free Press. Then come in to the Museum of the West and see the whole exhibit!

Above are examples of Ceratosaurus teeth that have been collected in the Grand Valley over the last few decades. Ceratosaurus was a carnivorous dinosaur that lived during the Jurassic Period, some 150 million years ago. Its bones and teeth are now preserved in the rocks known as the Morrison Formation. This theropod appears to be more rarely preserved.

The Specimens:

• MWC 1.1.6 - This tooth belongs to the type specimen of Ceratosaurus magnicornis, discovered by Lance Eriksen in 1976*.
• MWC 5823 - Dinosaur Journey volunteer Darrel Bay collected this tooth on September 29, 2006 at the museum’s Twin Juniper Quarry.
• MWC 5011 - Pete Mygatt collected this tooth from the Mygatt-Moore Quarry on June 21, 2001.
• MWC 5464 - This tooth was collected from the Mygatt-Moore Quarry on July 22, 1999 by Josh Ray.
• MWC 6798 - Collected in 1998, this tooth also came from the Mygatt-Moore Quarry and was prepared by Lorin King in 2004.

*The Backstory: Lance Eriksen, the first curator of paleontology at the Museum of Western Colorado, and his children collected the type (or first to be discovered) specimen of Ceratosaurus magnicornis from the Fruita Paleontological Area in 1975 and 1976. The fossils collected include a skeleton with skull (MWC 1 - premaxillae, maxillae, nasal, frontal, parietal, prefrontal, lacrimal, postorbital, squamosal, jugal, quatrojugal, quadrate and other skull bones, humerus, femur, tibia, astragalus, calcaneum, metatarsals and numerous vertebrae). This specimen is of a large individual, but not yet fully grown. This specimen was designated as the holotype of the new species by Jim Madsen and Sam Welles in 2000. This specimen is slightly larger than its close relative, Ceratosaurus nasicornis (initially discovered near Cañon City, Colorado), although the nasal horn is a bit longer and lower in Ceratosaurus magnicornis.

The skull of Ceratosaurus magnicornis is currently on exhibit at Dinosaur Journey.

References:

Madsen, James H.  & Samuel P. Welles. 2000. Ceratosaurus (Dinosauria, Theropoda). A revised osteology. Utah Geological Survey, Miscellaneous Publication 00-2: 80pp

Foster, John. 2007. “Gargantuan to Minuscule: The Morrison Menagerie, Part II”. in Jurassic West: The Dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation and Their World. Indiana University Press: 162–242.

Any material in our collections are covered under a permit though the appropriate agency and curated at the Museum of Western Colorado, unless otherwise noted.

The newest exhibit at the Museum of the West opened Friday, January 15. Three hundred people attended the opening of Distant Cities in the Mist: The Search for Lost Kingdoms. Native American singer Tim Trujillo provided entertainment to the crowd.

This year we have an outstanding array of trips for you. From one end of the globe to the other… we’ll see and hear glaciers calve… go leaf-peeping and sample Vermont maple syrup… hike into fabulous canyons… examine historic and prehistoric artifacts both inside and out. We’ll see wildlife in Alaska and Costa Rica and places in between. We’ll ski and hike and experience the incredible beauty the outdoor world has to offer.

Join us, fellow adventurers - we have something for everyone!

Find out more information and register online here.