PSU Magazine Winter 1995

1 collection-is e pecially app reciated in these bleak funding time · when field trip to learn the earth sciences first– hand have been drastically cur back. Yer being in the field is another of his professional mission . Excavating the duck-billed creature from the coastal rocks was Tay lor's project. The spec imen wa one he was familiar with as far back as 1974 when he was a paleontology student at the University of California at Berkeley. Ir had been discovered in the late 1960s by a U.S. Geologic Survey team that had been mapping the area, and there it stayed for nearly two and a half decades. "Somebody contacted me to get it out because he was afraid it would erode away," says Taylor, who pos essed the necessary credentials-being a paleontologist with a Ph.0.-ro ga in the proper permits for the excavation. He brought it out over the course of two field trips made up mostly of southern Oregon coast natives. "I wanted to make su re people in the loca l community were involved so no one would think we were just coming in and ripping this thing off and then leavi ng. I wanted to local people to see it too." The groups worked more than two days to dig a 5-inch-deep trench around the bone, which was embedded in hard sandstone. Then they worked their way underneath, and finally popped the specimen out of its rocky home. What the group came away with can fit in the palms of two hands. After 80 million years of geologic upheaval and exposure to the e lements, a ll that is left of the creature is a acrum-a railbone. Bur because paleon– tologists are part biologists, part geologists, and part detectives, Tay lor and his colleagues have a pretty good idea of what it was. "What we know from the size and hape of the bone will enab le us to eliminate other spec ies. We know we have an Upper C retaceous dinosaur, and we can rule ou t ho rned dinosaurs because of the bone's structure, " says T aylor. Another part of the detective work was determining how the dinosaur got there. O regon i, 111 ;1dl' 11p (If hlocks of fau lt-bound gcll lllgic formations, ca ll ed terrains, th;it h;1vc heen moving a long th e edge (If North America fo r millions of years. Taylor ,;1ys some parts of the coasr-possihly includ ing Cape Sebastian-wen: ancient islands that low ly crashed int() the mainland and became fused (Int() the cont inent. T ay lor ·recub1tes that the animal died somewhere in Ca Ii fornia-perhaps as far south as f);1j;1 - was swept out to sea, and hec;1me h11ric:d in sand, which later became -,; 111d-,1 Cl ne. The land conta ining the -,; 1ml-,rone drifted northward llvcr 1 c:ns (If millions of years and became gl1 1c:d onto Oregon. The site, a steer hc:;1dl;mJ surrounded by rock outcropp ings, is about five miles south of G() IJ Reach is unique; sc ientists and rock hounds have never found land-dwe lling dinosaurs in the state because most of Oregon was under water during those prehis– toric eons. Even the high desens of Oregon were a shallow marine environment. That's not to say there are no marine– dwelling dinosaurs buried somewhere in the state. "It's conceivable that you could go to eastern Oregon and find a dinosaur in a marine depo it. Ir's just that nobody has done it yet," says Taylor. The Cape Sebastian project was one of many digs Tay lor has performed over the years, including one he did in Wyoming with a PSU class in 1987 that produced the Museum Associa– tion's triceratops skeleton. Bur perhars his most memorab le Jig was when he wa an eighth grader growing up in southwest Portland. He read in the newsr aper of a construction crew that came across the rema ins of a wooly mammoth while lay ing pipe. T ay lor went to check it out, and in the process found a mammoth tooth sticki ng our of a creek bank, 100 ya rds from where the crew had excavated. "l was so exc ited I went home and got my sleep ing bag and slept next to it thinking something horrible might happen to it," he says. He dug it out the nex t day, and today it is part of the Muse um Association's coll ecti on. Bur what really launched him on his career was a find his brother made on an Oregon beach: an agate with an internal mo ld of a clam shell. It The skull of a 20-million-year· old beardog found in the John Day formation. a ship in a bottle: how did that clam ever get into the rock? 'That sent me off on my career. I started read ing geo log ic texts and books on paleontology," he says. The Museum Assoc iation is redefining its mission as it looks for new headquarter . Throughout the process, Taylor continues to keep the dream of an exhibit museum alive, a he says, "to pay tribute to the heritage we have in Oregon." "It's surprising that Oregon has this wonderful past record, and nobody seems to know much about it because we do not have a facility that interprets it." When it finally happens, Tay lor– with his truckloads of bones-will have no trouble filling it. D WINTER 1995 15