Diggin’ up bones
Diggin’ up bones: Dinosaur ranchers find fossils for profit, posterity
Jake Harris (center), his dad Mike (right) and their neighbor, Aaron Bollan were featured in Dino Hunters, a reality show on Discovery Channel. PHOTO COURTESY OF DISCOVERY CHANNEL.
Jake Harris was a teacher who came back to help on his family’s ranch and now spends summers digging dinosaur bones. PHOTO COURTESY OF DISCOVERY CHANNEL.
BY MARIA TIBBETTS
T
he West is strewn with bones. The bones of cattle that couldn’t make another winter, deer that didn’t outrun coyotes and coyotes that couldn’t outrun disease.
But as wind and weather move the soil in a cycle older than time, other bones surface. Bones of bison that once roamed the Plains. Deeper still are the bones of creatures humans have seen only in movies and museums. The bones of animals that weighed twice as much as an elephant and were designed for ripping flesh weather out of the sagebrush draws and cutbanks in several Western states, and some ranch families are turning hunting dinosaurs into as much of a way of life as raising cattle.
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Jake Harris and his dad, Mike, run Angus cattle near Newcastle, Wyoming, but over the last 20 years they’ve become experts at identifying, excavating and preserving dinosaur fossils. The ranch is on what’s known as the Lance Creek Formation, a geologic formation that stretches across Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota. The Lance Creek Formation dates to the Cretaceous period, estimated to be about 66 million years old. “I was just riding along 20 years ago, and said, ‘Hey, look at that,’” said Jake. “It didn’t look like a cow bone, and we knew we were in the Cretaceous. We probably rode over it a million times on horseback. We started digging.
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