When this beast walked the earth, it walked the walk and didn’t need any talk. It was the biggest land animal ever.
Now, 140 million years after its extinction, 23-year-old Matthew T. Mossbrucker, museum educator for the Morrison Natural History Museum, is hopeful he can coax the mighty beast to rise from the soils and once again tower high above the land.
He and a small band of volunteers known as the Ajax Discovery Team, lead by Robert T. Bakker, curator of paleontology at the Morrison museum, reopened the Ajax Quarry (just east of the town of Morrison) this past summer. Its exact location is kept secret to prevent looting. But its general coordinates place it somewhere in the high ground of Dinosaur Ridge in the Hogback.
Quarry No. 10, or the Ajax Quarry, has not been worked since 1879. A series of cave-ins made the pit far too dangerous to continue exploration at the time.
Yet before abandoning the pit more than 100 years ago, the bones of Apatosaurus ajax were found. This 90-foot long mighty plant-eater, called “Ajax” for short, was the biggest of the brontosauruses.
“They had limbs that would put elephants to shame,” Mossbrucker said. “These were the largest animals that ever graced the land.”
This new venture into the humid prehistorical past of the Earth is being supported by a pair of grants, one from Aggregate Industries and one from the Jefferson County Cultural Council. The Ajax Discovery Team also is thankful to Leo Bradley of the Bear Creek Development Corp., for allowing the team to proceed with its exploration of the site. Bradley owns the quarry,
“I’d love to shake his hand,” Mossbrucker said of Bradley. “He is helping us out quite a bit.”
Back in 1878, when Professor Arthur Lakes of the Colorado School of Mines was first excavating, he had little more to work with than his passion for science and a handful of paid laborers.
“Back in the late 1870s, dinosaurs were brand new to the public. They were very sexy, and everyone had to have one,” Mossbrucker said. Those searching for them, he added, “were in a state of mind sort of a Victorian trophy hunter. They were looking for a skull.”
But only the brain case of a skull was ever found, along with some massive bones. After spending many years at Yale University, the bones were returned to Morrison, including a massive right forelimb on display at the Morrison museum, which opened in 1990.
Because the priorities of searchers were different, because the body of knowledge about dinosaurs was so limited at the time and thanks to modern technological advances, Mossbrucker is confident there will be many new discoveries coming from the Ajax Quarry in the years to come.
“The Ajax Quarry is a very steep quarry and he (Lakes) was very excited. He was paying a lot of untrained amateurs to look for him, so I’m sure there are things he missed,” Mossbrucker said.
The going is slow. Mossbrucker and the team are analyzing the soil and the rocks trying to get a sense of what the environment of Morrison was like all those years ago. The also team is expecting to find an array of other animals fossilized over the centuries.
“We also want to figure out how the dinosaurs got there,” he said. “It could take years, there are so many unanswered questions that have been raised about prehistoric Morrison.
But, as with any good scientific inquiry, he added, “We’ll probably end up with more questions than answers at the end of this project.”