Entries on this thread will record the newsworthy events that transpire almost daily since living dinosaurs returned to Yellowstone Park and the plains of eastern Montana. Although most people have yet to make vacation plans to come and see the incredible flourish of living fossils, I have the privilege of a bunkhouse room at Will Daniels’ Twin Creeks Ranch in the heart of dinosaur country, where creatures of every type from the late Cretaceous Era now roam, fly, creep and thunder.
It is my purpose to present some new views of dinosaurs, not as dusty skeletons in museums or rubberized animatronic robots, but rather as the living, breathing, braying, fighting and loving creatures they once were and now are again.
Mercifully, the dark days of warfare that brought them here have passed, thanks to a truce struck by humans and the Kra, dinosaurian former masters of the earth. Even though most people feel the war ended victoriously for humankind, nevertheless the Kra can hold their dinosaurian heads high – about eight feet high in a healthy adult specimen – because their invasion from space was not completely repulsed by us humans, and colonies of dinosaurs exist now on all continents including North America. At Twin Creeks Ranch, the Kra are celebrating their return to their capital city, Arran Kra, in a frenzy of excavations bringing the 65-million-year-old ruins back to light after an epoch encased in the rocks of Sandstone Mountain.
The forests, hills and plains around here are teeming with plants and animals of the past. While I have no formal training as a paleontologist, I am exceedingly lucky to have access to the illustrious Dr. David Ogilvey, long-time Montana dinosaur expert and recently-named head of the Institute for Dinosaur Studies at Arran Kra. Dr. Ogilvey’s long career began with studies of old bones, but recently he’s shifted to living examples of dinosaurs large and small, which he describes in field reports telling of life histories and behaviors that are often quite amazing.
For instance, did you know that tyrannosaurs sit on their nests to incubate their eggs? How they do that without smashing the little delicate things is quite beyond me at the moment, but I promise a full report as soon as I can sit down with Dr. Ogilvey and get the details.
I’d be remiss if I ignored Kit Daniels, Will Daniels’ daughter, a college student majoring in paleontology and the first student enrolled for training at Dr. Ogilvey’s new Institute. She is also the first student in the history of the world to have such an incredible class project: to prepare a complete, fresh skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex for display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. That’s right, I said a fresh skeleton. She is right now in the process of cleaning the skeleton of the huge rex killed by Chase Armstrong in the unfortunate fighting during the dinosaur invasion at Twin Creeks Ranch.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t give the intrepid Chase Armstrong his due. Yellowstone Park Biologist and wolf reintroduction specialist, Chase has long been handy with tranquilizer darts and rifle. Now, these tools of his craft have been adjusted to the larger doses he must deliver to the new targets of his research. Beyond wolves, he’s now a dinosaur reintroduction specialist as well, whether he ever wanted such a thing or not.
I’m sure each one of these people is still in shock from suddenly finding dinosaurs all around them. But each is made of the stuff to bravely forge ahead in the new and unknown world that presents itself daily.
This note and notes to come are small tastes of the intense, daily barrage of things dinosaurian here at Twin Creeks Ranch.
I’ll do my best to keep you informed.
Next: Tyrannosaur Valley
