Dinosaur Ridge

In 1877 a schoolteacher named Arthur Lakes was walking the ridge near Morrison when he spotted enormous bones weathering out of the sandstone. His discovery, and others made the same year, set off one of the most famous rivalries in the history of science, the so-called Bone Wars between paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, who raced to name new dinosaurs from the western quarries.

The Morrison quarries produced some of the first well-known American dinosaurs, including Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Allosaurus, and gave their name to the Morrison Formation, the great band of Jurassic rock that runs across much of the West and holds fossils from Colorado to Utah and beyond. The very rock unit paleontologists still study by that name was defined here at the ridge.

The far side of the ridge exposes a younger chapter. About 100 million years ago, in the Cretaceous, a shallow inland sea covered much of the continent, and its western shoreline ran right through here. Along that muddy coast, dinosaurs left footprints that dried and were buried and eventually turned to stone. Today one famous slab, tilted up nearly vertical, shows hundreds of tracks crossing in different directions, a place scientists call the Dinosaur Ridge trackway.

You can see the difference between the round, elephant-like prints of plant-eating ornithopods and the three-toed tracks of meat-eaters, and read the direction a herd was moving across the old shore. Ripple marks preserved in the same rock record the gentle waves of that vanished sea, so the slab captures not just the animals but the beach they walked on.

Dinosaur Ridge is part of a hogback, a narrow ridge of hard, resistant rock left standing after the softer layers around it wore away. The layers here were laid down flat, on floodplains and along a seashore, then tilted steeply when the modern Rocky Mountains pushed up along the Front Range tens of millions of years ago. That tilting is what stood the ancient ground surfaces up on edge so we can walk past them.

Because the rock is tipped, a short walk along the ridge is a walk through millions of years of time, from the Jurassic bone beds on one side to the Cretaceous shoreline and its tracks on the other. Signs along the road point out each layer, so the whole ridge reads like an open book of the region's deep past.

The ridge sits at the mouth of Morrison, a small, historic foothills town of stone buildings and creekside cafes where the Great Plains give way to the mountains. The town has long been a gateway to the high country, and its old buildings are built from the same golden sandstone that shows up in the ridge itself.

Just to the west rises Red Rocks, the famous natural amphitheater set among towering slabs of red sandstone, part of the same tilted geology on a grander scale. Between the tracks, the quarries, the town, and Red Rocks, the corner around Dinosaur Ridge packs a lot of Colorado into a small area an easy drive from Denver.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.