Welcome to the Cope-Lucas Quarries
The Cope-Lucas Quarries were an amazingly productive series of fossil beds in Garden Park, an area just north of Cañon City, Colorado. They were first discovered 1877 by a local school teacher named Oramel W. Lucas, and excavated by him and members of his family for noted paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope. Lucas’s discoveries in Cañon City played a large part in the Bone Wars, the fierce competition between Cope and rival paleontologist O. C. Marsh. The Cope-Lucas Quarries helped turn the focus of the war to dinosaurs, and in so doing affected the course of American vertebrate paleontology.
Explore the site to learn more of the history of these quarries, the Lucas family, and the fossils themselves.
