The Ohio State University

onCampus

• Help
• Buckeye Link
• Map
• Find People
• Webmail
• Search

  Search Ohio State Go

A digger’s dream … OSU geologist spends his summers hunting dinosaurs

Posted on | August 12, 2009 | 2,272 views |

by Adam King

Dale Gnidovec knows what it’s like not to have a shower for a week. His record, in fact, is two weeks without bathing.

“My wife is completely appalled by that,” says Gnidovec, an Ohio State geologist and curator of the Orton Geological Museum, with a bit of a snicker.

Lucky for him his wife is the understanding sort. She knows when Gnidovec goes au natural it means he’s in the midst of his 35-year passion: Digging up dinosaur bones across the West and Midwest.

“I get to do what I always wanted to do as a kid, and I’m still doing it,” Gnidovec said.

For up to five weeks every summer over the past 10 years, Gnidovec has trekked to a fossil-rich area of south-central Montana known as the Mother’s Day Quarry in the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation.

It’s a paleontologist’s delight with what seems a limitless supply of remains — about 250 to 500 bones are pulled from the ground there every year and sent to the Cincinnati Museum Center for study and preservation.

So while the finds themselves don’t make their way back to Ohio State with Gnidovec, he brings back a multitude of stories to relate to his earth history students and the middle and elementary school students who visit the Orton Geological Museum or who hear his lectures.

Gnidovec also shares his experience through numerous pictures taken at the dig sites.

“And as one geologist said, ‘The best geologist is the one who has seen the most geology,’” Gnidovec said. “And there’s a lot of geology out there.”

The Morrison Formation has produced some of the most famous dinosaur fossils, including Allosaurus, Stegosaurus and Apatosaurus (formerly known as Brontosaurus). And the three summers before last year, Gnidovec had been working to uncover an adult Diplodocus — a four-legged land-dwelling dinosaur with a long neck and long tail. The field jacket containing the main body weighed nearly 4,000 pounds.

This summer at a satellite site from the main quarry, Gnidovec worked on the flipper and backbones of a Plesiosaur, an aquatic reptile.

The finds are exciting for Gnidovec, but getting from discovery to extraction is a tedious challenge.

“At the main site, the bones are just in there like jackstraws,” he said. “One of my first years out there, I had an area that was 2 feet by 2 feet and it had about 34 bones in there. It was just a mess. It’s all the same kind of animals but multiple individuals. It can be hard when they’re all mixed together.”

But sometimes, he said, the hardest part of a dig is some of the people who come out.

While having his fun — which includes being exposed to sweltering heat (two straight weeks of 110-degree weather one year), bugs, snakes, little to no shade and hours upon hours of being on his knees — Gnidovec also is responsible for “herding” guests. The quarry is one of about a dozen dig sites throughout the West that accept tourists willing to pay for the privilege of uncovering bones.

“One year there was a girl who came out who wouldn’t stop talking,” he said. “Then we had one guy who never stopped talking to himself. Some are just in love with it and you have to tie them up to get them out of the quarry. Others decide it’s not what they wanted to do with their vacation so we let them wander off and watch the birds. You never know what you’re going to get out there.”

Gnidovec’s main job with the tourists is to make sure they don’t damage the bones, although that happens even to the most cautious expert.

“We had one guy we nicknamed Destructo,” Gnidovec said. “It would be like, ‘Geez, he got another one.’ But that’s the chance you take. Some things are going to be lost and you sort of get a feel after the first day how someone is going to be and put them on a bone that’s not so important.”

Every fossil is measured, photographed in place and given a compass orientation before being removed and plaster casted for transport to Cincinnati.

“I’ve been digging bones for more than 30 years,” Gnidovec said, “and it’s still exciting to uncover something that hasn’t seen the sun for more than 150 million years.”

TIPS FOR DIGGING OUT FOSSILS

• If you find a plant, don’t yank it out by the roots because often the roots will go down into the bone and you’ll destroy the bone.
• Don’t overprep, also known as cleaning off too much of the rock. You want to do that in the lab where you have the proper tools.
• Use glue to seal cracks that run through the bones.

Comments