At the quarry, excavating continued summer and winter. The methods
employed were those that paleontologists had used for decades. There was
no compressed air, no labor-saving devices. The work was done by hand.
The crew, which seldom exceeded four men at any one time, became
veterans in the art of fossil extraction. The bone was brittle; the
encasing sandstone, hard. It required toil, patient direction, and a
knowledge of anatomy.
Judiciously placed charges of giant powder shattered the overburden.
Hand drills, wedge-and-feather, and crowbar worked the rock away, until
the bone layer was encountered. The slow attrition by hammer and chisel
accomplished the final delicate separation of the remains from the
enclosing matrix. Team-and-scraper and small handcarts removed the
rubble that swiftly accumulated in the cut. As the bones were chiseled
from the quarry face in large blocks of rock, they were encased in
strips of burlap dipped in flour paste. (Later, plaster of Paris
supplanted the flour paste.) Then they were lowered by rope onto a
mule-drawn skid and “snaked” down the trail into the gulch to await
boxing.
[Illustration: REMOVING A LARGE THIGH BONE FROM THE QUARRY WALL
DURING THE CARNEGIE MUSEUM OPERATIONS. (COURTESY, A. S.
COGGESHALL.)]
[Illustration: PLASTERED SPECIMEN REMOVED FROM THE QUARRY DURING THE
CARNEGIE MUSEUM OPERATIONS. (COURTESY, A. S. COGGESHALL.)]
Transporting the fossils from quarry to railhead was a major
undertaking. It required wagon trains—4-horse teams hauling high-wheeled
freight wagons over 60 miles of rutted roads to Dragon, Utah. There the
precious goods were loaded onto boxcars of the now abandoned narrow
gauge Uintah Railway, later to be transhipped to the standard gauge
Denver & Rio Grande line at Mack, Colo.