#fossilcabin

7/2/2014 – So what did Lincoln have to do with dinosaurs? Well, we all know from the movie that he was a vampire hunter, but dinosaur hunter? No-but the Lincoln Highway in Wyoming went through the site of some great dinosaur finds and a hotly contested area in what became known as The Dinosaur Wars.

Two overly ambitious scientists, Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh, who of course were once friends, first battled over a quarry in New Jersey, one paying the owner after the other found some bones of the one of the first identified American dinosaur species. Their battle traveled with their work in Colorado and Wyoming, each spying on the other, using bribes to block access, paying off bone hunters, and destroying bones they couldn’t carry out in a season. They hastily assembled bones-often mistakenly-to publish results before the other, and tried to discredit each other in their papers. They died broke and bitter, but also left a huge positive legacy in paleontology. They discovered and named 146 species, some discredited, but some of the best known today, including triceratops, allosaurus, and stegasaurus. Their most productive bone hunting ground, and site of most bitter disputes, was Como Bluff, near Medicine Bow Wyoming. The site yielded tons of bones between 1877 and 1892, each man financing digs every summer-at 7000 feet elevation, winter comes early-and sometimes visiting to settle disputes. Some of their employees quit, feuded among themselves, and went to work for the other man.

The Lincoln Highway was conceived and built as the first coast to coast highway in 1913. Intended as a memorial to Abraham Lincoln, private donors such as Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and Woodrow Wilson joined businessmen in funding the venture. Constructed along old trails, as are many of our highways today, it started in Times Square in New York and ended in Lincoln Park in San Francisco. The association convinced cement makers to pave some parts of the gravel road to gain public support for government funding of a fully paved road, which the group didn’t have funds to accomplish. They also placed monuments to Lincoln along the way, one of them at the highest elevation along the road on Sherman Summit in Wyoming. The 13 foot tall bronze bust on a 30 foot high granite base now sits in a rest area on I-80, with Lincoln looking over at the summit where the Lincoln Highway once ran. In the 1920’s, the new government highway system assigned numbers to the Lincoln Highway and other automobile roads. From Illinois to Wyoming, the road was designated US 30.  Today, the old highway route is followed by US 1, US 30/40/50, and I-80.

Within sight of Como Bluff, Thomas Boylan, a rancher and businessman decided to reconstruct a dinosaur to make people stop at his gas station on the Lincoln Highway. Not sure he could find all the right bones, he and his son ended up building a “cabin” from a collection of bones in 1932 about the size of the body of diplodocus, a dinosaur named by Othniel Marsh and found at Como Bluff. It was billed as the “oldest cabin”, and the “building that used to walk”. The station operated until the 1960’s, when I-80 was opened to the south and the Lincoln Highway, now US-30, was left behind. The building was turned into a museum, but has been closed and empty since the last manager died. In my two visits to the area in the last four years, it has been for sale, along with a stone cabin and acreage at the foot of the historic Como Bluff.