Devil's Toenails

On the other side of the mountains from us you’ll find Wyoming’s Red Gulch Dinosaur Track Site. Unless you have a serious interest in paleontology it’s probably not worth the effort getting there. The long and tedious drive through a moon like landscape into the middle of nowhere seems endless; making the idea of the site wildly more romantic than it is in reality. But to think that 167 million years ago, while the west was still buried beneath a shallow sea, a herd of dinosaur crowded through here and left a fossilized bed so dense with tracks that it’s now called The Ballroom....... is amazing! It’s as if the dinosaurs (or some monster sized chickens) danced by moonlight, leaving at least a thousand prehistoric foot prints trailing beneath the stars. How cool would it have been to have witnessed something like that? Also, the area is littered with Devil’s Toenails (common jurassic oyster/bivalve gryphaea arcuata fossils) and visitors are welcomed by interpretive signs to collect them as souvenirs

I wonder if the one I’m holding in my hand right now was brushed aside during that primordial dance......... a small thread connecting them to me......... I wonder whose grasp it will have fallen into 160 million years from now............. What an incomprehensibly wondrous world this is!