Ghost Ranch

In 1881 David Baldwin discovered small fossilized bones on what is now Ghost Ranch. He mailed the bones to paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope in Philadelphia. Cope had been through the area in the late 1870s and had urged Baldwin to explore and see what he could collect. In 1889 Cope named the little dinosaur Coelophysis bauri after Georg Baur, a German morphologist. (Coelophysis means "hollow form," referring to the lightly constructed bones.)

In June 1947, a field crew led by Edwin H. Colbert from the American Museum of Natural History in New York stopped at Ghost Ranch on their way to Petrified Forest National Monument in Arizona. They knew that Baldwin and other paleontologists had discovered fossils in the area. They soon found fragments of fossilized bone that they recognized were from the small dinosaur, Coelophysis.

Hoping to find a partial skeleton, Colbert and his crew carefully dug into the hillside. Instead of a partial skeleton they found a dense bone bed of hundreds of preserved skeletons. Because the skeletons overlapped each other, they had to excavate the fossils in large blocks of rock. They encased 13 blocks in plaster field jackets, each of which contained numerous whole and partial skeletons.

In 1981 and 1982, field crews from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, and other institutions, collected 15 large blocks from the quarry. In 1983 another large block was excavated by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History. The last block was excavated in 1985 and is on display at the Ruth Hall Museum at Ghost Ranch.

(sidebar) Did You Know? 1976 - Ghost Ranch's Coelophysis Quarry was designated a National Natural Landmark by the National Park Service. 1981 -The New Mexico State Legislature named Coelophysis the New Mexico State Fossil beating out Brontosaurus. 1998 - Coelophysis was the second dinosaur in space when it traveled on NASA's Endeavor Space Shuttle. A Coelophysis skull, quarried at Ghost Ranch, was sent to space by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. It left Earth on January 22 and returned on January 31.

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