History
Cleveland-Delfs Quarry
On the following pages you will read about the Cleveland-Delfs Quarry, which was excavated during the early 1950s. The quarry was discovered by Edwin Delfs for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and uncovered more than just dinosaurs; thus showing us the biological diversity of the Late Jurassic period.
The Cleveland-Delfs quarry was found quite by chance in the summer of 1954. A small field expedition from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History travelled to the American West in search of a dinosaur that would be a suitable specimen to mount and exhibit in their museum.1 The Party, which included a Zoology undergraduate from Yale University - Edwin Delfs - and high-school students Wesley Williams, William West, and Richard Jones, arrived in Vernal, Utah to participate in a "Geology of the West" field course run by Leroy "Pop" Kay, a curator from the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh.2 After the completion of the four day field course, Kay split the party into two groups and gave them each tips on where dinosaurs might be found. Delfs and his high-school students headed west into Colorado and stopped near the Colorado National Monument in Grand Junction.3
It was here that Delfs and his crew received a tip from geology students at Louisiana State University about a possible dinosaur site in the Garden Park Area of Cañon City. The Louisiana’s crew leader, Dr. Carl Sanderson, shared maps and details about the locality and gave Delfs a bone fragment that he had collected. This bone fragment later turned out to be the posterior end of the fourth cervical vertebra.4 After receiving detailed information, Delfs and his crew headed south-east to Cañon City and set up camp and located the dinosaur site near the east bank of Four Mile Creek.
The Quarry on Four Mile Creek
The eroding east bank of Four Mile Creek uncovered a layer of mudstone sandwiched between layers of sandstone. The dinosaur skeleton was discovered in the mudstone, which, because of its location between the two sandstones, made it difficult to remove the dinosaur. Nonetheless, the first day’s excavations revealed a large amount of bone fragments.
During the 1950s, the area around Garden Park was covered with uranium prospectors. Delfs was worried by the amount of prospectors staking claims in the vicinity and especially by the prospect that he might "lose" the rights to the dinosaur site. In an effort to protect the site for the museum, Delfs decided to stake his own claim for the site, which he named “Sawropod,” with the county clerk in Fremont County.5 Once he had established ownership of the area, Delfs returned to the quarry to begin excavations. His first major discovery consisted of the atlas and axis and two neck vertebrae, and then, as Delfs and his crew continued to dig further into the bank between the two layers of sandstone, they found more of the skeletal material.6 It must be noted here that the methods used by Delfs to excavate the dinosaur were extremely dangerous and are not recommended!
Delfs and his crew shored up the upper sandstone layer with heavy timbers and slowly moved into the hillside, removing pieces of the large skeleton as they went. The skeleton was lying on its left side and was largely articulated, and, as so often happens with sauropods, the neck was drawn sharply backward and the skull had snapped off and was not found.7 Delfs and his crew made field jackets out of burlap sack and plaster of Paris that encased the bones and matrix. The jackets provided protection for the bones on their journey back to the Cleveland Museum.
According to Delfs, the largest field jacket weighed about 2,500 lbs and was winched across the creek on a flat wooden raft where it was then loaded on to a truck bed for its transportation to Cleveland. It was not until the jackets were unpacked in the lab that the “distinctive spinal configuration of Haplocanthosaurus” was revealed.8
Haplocanthosaurus is a rare dinosaur and is found only in two other locations, one near Snowmass, Colorado and the other in Wyoming. Therefore, Delfs' discovery is still an important one for paleontologists and science. In fact Garden Park boasts two species of Haplocanthosaurus with Delfs dinosaur, H. delfsi, being the larger of the two.9
Gnats, Floods and Dynamite
During the following years of excavation – 1955 and 1957–, Delfs took a different approach for the removal of the dinosaur bones. Delfs employed a local rancher, Joe Rhode, to bulldoze the back of the hillside that was covering the top layer of sandstone and then very carefully blasted the sandstone away. One has to remember that these are high school students under the guidance of an undergraduate: this too was a dangerous approach to removing the dinosaur!
Regardless, the crew proceeded to excavate the dinosaur from the top rather than the side. During the 1955 season, Delfs’ crew excavated a large portion of the vertebral column and pelvis, and then in 1957 they uncovered the tail, leg bones, and other material including a complete six foot long crocodile, later named Eutretauranosuchus delfsi. In total, the excavation recovered about 60% of the skeleton of Haplocanthosaurus, Eutretauranosuchus, turtle fragments, and numerous carnivorous dinosaur teeth.10 The excavation however, was not without its set-backs. For example, in 1954, not soon after arriving at the site the crew was struck down by a throat infection that forced them to stop their search for the dinosaur bones.11
Also the area was prone to flash flooding. Delfs described an early warning system that the local ranchers set up for him and his crew.
“The rancher farthest up the canyon would call the one near us, who would dash over with the news…we would then secure the site with sandbags as best we could.”
On one occasion a “wall of water” over ten feet high roared down the canyon, carrying with it large boulders and debris washed away from the banks of the creek, and while a couple of jackets got lost, there was only minimal damage to the site and, thankfully, no loss of life.12 The other problem encountered is one that is very well known to paleontologists – gnats! Gnats can bring excavations to a total stand still with their continual hounding, buzzing, and biting.
Haplocanthosaurus comes Alive!
The bones of the Haplocanthosaurus exhibit excellent preservation and because of the permineralization process they are a dark black color. The skeleton was mounted by preparators at the American Museum of Natural History with the missing parts modeled or cast from other skeletal remains residing in museums around the United States, while Delfs modeled the skull from a composite of similar know sauropod types. The skull was small, but it was filled with blunt teeth that were used to graze on plants; and “Happy”, as the dinosaur is affectionately called at the Cleveland Museum, needed a lot of plant material to survive. Because the teeth were blunt, Haplocanthosaurus probably ingested rocks – or gastric stones – to help with the digestion of the plant material.13 “Happy,” supported by an iron structure, is now on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and stands some seventy two feet long and fourteen feet high at the hip with the femur being over six feet tall.14
The skeleton, although on continual public display from 1963, was not scientifically studied and described until 1988 when John S. McIntosh of the Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut and Michael E. Williams, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum, undertook a systematic study of the skeletal remains. After careful study and comparisons with other specimens of Haplocanthosaurus, McIntosh and Williams determined that the Cleveland specimen represented a new species, which they named Haplocanthosaurus delfsi in honor of Edwin Delfs. Further, the find from the Garden Park Fossil Area represented the largest known specimen of Haplocanthosaurus. The specimen is the only one known to be mounted and on permanent display and is one of only a few sauropod dinosaurs mounted in the United States.15
“Happy” was originally displayed lying down, as it had been found, but in 1963 the skeleton was remounted to the standing position in which it can now be seen. As of 1988, “Happy” represented the only adult Haplocanthosaurus to be found, although three other specimens have been found in Garden Park.16
Edwin Delfs
And what became of Edwin Delfs? Although Edwin Delfs pursued two years of graduate work in vertebrate paleontology at Columbia University, he switched careers and entered into the medical profession instead. In 1991, Delfs visited Garden Park to participate in the unveiling of an interpretative panel located on an overlook on the opposite side of
the creek where he found the Haplocanthosaurus.
Dr. Edwin R. Delfs died in 2002, but his love for paleontology never waned and he continued to participate in paleontology digs as a volunteer until his death.