So, what did I learn in those badlands in Montana? Well, growing up, dinosaurs were always portrayed as dim-witted, slow-moving loners. That was the prevailing view of them at the time. But, under a starry night sky, by the glow of a smoky campfire, we discussed Horner’s latest findings and theories.
I learned that the fossil evidence indicated that dinosaurs were more like fast-moving, warm-blooded animals than slow, cold-blooded reptiles and that some were actually graceful, social creatures, with many species traveling in gigantic herds. Paleontologists know this by the many dinosaur trackways found all over the world. Those are footprints embedded in stone, all belonging to the same dinosaur species.
Jack Horner, the world-renowned paleontologist, discovered this fact in a very different way. The bone bed—that’s the layer of rock containing the fossil bones that I was digging in—was found to be the buried tomb of approximately ten thousand dinosaurs, stretching a mile and a quarter from east to west and a quarter mile from north to south. Located at the base of the Rocky Mountains, this area was once an upper coastal plain along the edge of the Cretaceous Interior Seaway about seventy-seven million years ago.
In the Camposaur site alone, the pit yielded about fifty bones per cubic meter; that’s over forty-five hundred bone fragments from about thirty individuals. These individuals included juveniles, or the young, along with the adults, all of the same species of a plant-eating dinosaur, a new species of herbivore Horner named Maiasaura. And more than that: Horner had uncovered the fossil remains of a herd!
