Файл:Cope Quarry.jpgOne of the few photographs taken shortly after the discovery of dinosaur bones in the Garden Park area. These bones are of the first Camarasaurus supremus skeleton being excavated by Oramel Lucas for E. D. CopeФайл:Marsh Quarry.JPGFelch Quarry 1 (Marsh-Felch Quarry) in the Garden Park Paleontological Resource Area. Discovered in 1877, this site produced numerous holotypes of dinosaurs, which were named by O. C. Marsh. Most of the specimens are at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.
Garden Park was formed by erosion of sedimentary rocks that have been distorted by uplift of the Rocky Mountains. The region is bisected by Four Mile Creek (also called Oil Creek), which has carved a canyon through the Mesozoic and Paleozoic sedimentary rocks. One of these Mesozoic strata is the Morrison Formation, which is exposed within the canyon. However, because the formation contains high amounts of swelling clays, large faulted blocks or slump-blocks of the formation are slowly moving towards the creek. The result is to make it difficult to correlate the various dinosaur quarries because exposures are limited and not continuous.
The formation in Garden Park can be divided informally into a lower and upper unit.[1] The lower unit is composed primarily green and gray mudstones, with numerous lenticular, white to tan to gray sandstones. The upper is composed mostly of red mudstone, with lesser amounts of yellowish, often tabular sandstone. These two units probably correspond to the Tidwell, Saltwash and Brushy Basin members of the Morrison Formation on the Colorado Plateau.
Dinosaurs
The discovery of dinosaurs in the Garden Park area has been presented numerous times by Schuchert and LeVene,[2] Shur,[3] Ostrom and McIntosh,[4] and Jaffe.[5]Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope both produced major finds here.[6] The lesser known post-Marsh and Cope collecting of dinosaurs has been presented by Monaco.[7] She recounts the expeditions by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in the early 20th century, the Denver Museum of Natural History in the 1930 and 1990s, and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in the mid-1950s.
↑Carpenter, K. 1998. Vertebrate biostratigraphy of the Morrison Formation near Cañon City, Colorado. In Carpenter, K., Chure, D. and Kirkland, J.I. (eds.) The Morrison Formation: An Interdisciplinary Study. Modern Geology 23:407-426.
↑Schuchert, C., and LeVene, C.M. 1940. O.C.Marsh, Pioneer in Paleontology. Yale University Press, New Haven.
↑Shur, E. 1974. The Fossil Feud. Exposition Press, NY. 340p.
↑Ostrom, J,H., and McIntosh, J.S. 1966. Marsh's Dinosaurs: The Collections from Como Bluff. Yale University Press, New Haven.
↑Jaffe, M. 2000. The Gilded Dinosaur. Crown Publ., New York.
↑McCarren, Mark J. The Scientific Contributions of Othniel Charles Marsh, pp 1, 8, 20, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Шаблон:ISBN.
↑Monaco, P.E. 1998.A short history of dinosaur collecting in the Garden Park Fossil Area, Canon City, Colorado. In, Carpenter, K., Chure, D. and Kirkland, J.I. (eds.) The Morrison Formation: An Interdisciplinary Study. Modern Geology 23: 465-480.
↑Carpenter, K. 1998. Vertebrate biostratigraphy of the Morrison Formation near Cañon City, Colorado. In Carpenter, K., Chure, D. and Kirkland, J.I. (eds.) The Morrison Formation: An Interdisciplinary Study. Modern Geology 23:407-426.
↑McIntosh, J.S. 1998. New information about the Cope collection of sauropods from Garden Park, Colorado. In Carpenter, K., Chure, D. and Kirkland, J.I. (eds.) The Morrison Formation: An Interdisciplinary Study. Modern Geology 23:481-506.
