Arthur Lakes meets the sea monsters of Fossil Creek

By Gary Raham
Nature Writer and Illustrator

Arthur Lakes preceded me in Colorado by 100 years, but I believe we would have made great friends.

We both practiced teaching and art; we both became captivated by a sea-level version of Colorado, whose former existence sometimes asserts itself when beautiful and somewhat mysterious fossil shells and sea monsters erode from clay soils and sandstone ridges.

I will get a chance to reenact a moment in Lakes' life on Oct. 21, just 129 years and three days after he and his eager students jumped off a slow-moving train where railroad tracks cross Fossil Creek in what is now Red Tail Grove Natural Area just south of Harmony Road.

This will be "Ramble 11" in a series of field trips hosted by The Friends of Dinosaur Ridge, an organization that educates the public about the dinosaur footprints and fossil remains still visible in the hogbacks near Morrison, west of Denver (www.dinoridge.org).

Lakes had a tough year in 1878. The school at which he had taught for nine years burned to the ground, and he was out of work.

He had made a life for himself teaching at an Episcopal Boy's Prep school in Golden, after attending Queens College, Oxford, England, and immigrating to the United States. He began teaching in 1869, and became a deacon in the church and itinerant minister for Idaho Springs in 1874.

Lakes most likely would never have entered history books at all--although he did go on to become a distinguished professor in the earth sciences --if he hadn't discovered the first dinosaur bones in Colorado and found himself stuck in the middle of a feud between two rich academics of the day, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Marsh - but that's another, if somewhat related story.

The fossil sleuth Lakes discovered the bones of Apatosaurus, a giant sauropod, and Stegosaurus, another jumbo veggie-eating dinosaur, in the spring of 1877. Marsh, eager to find bones of these then-exotic giants, offered to pay Lakes to find more--at least for a few months.

Marsh invited Lakes to New Haven, Conn., to see his academic collections at Yale and seal the deal.

Between April when the school burned and his trip back east, Lakes and a party of students had some time to explore the fossil-rich, semi-wilderness six miles south of the nearly completed agricultural college at Fort Collins.

According to the State School of Mines' Colorado Transcript of Oct. 23, 1878, "The weather was propitious, and our party, but for the presence of ladies and the Rev. J.R. Eads with us, might have been mistaken for a squad of navies or coal miners on their way to Erie armed with heavy sledges and picks."

The travelers enjoyed spectacular scenery along the way and were treated to professor Lakes' vivid tales of extinct creatures. The Transcript said that with a little imagination a cow on the track might easily be transformed into a giant brontotherium out for a stroll. (Think huge rhino with a multi-horned snout.)

The scenery included a wall of basaltic lava near Boulder called Valmont Butte and "the magnificent mountain mass of Longs Peak (14,370 feet), the summit of which is cloven from top to timberline by a sheer smooth perpendicular cliff 3,000 feet high."

The scientists also observed that "the little towns of Berthoud and Loveland seemed to be building up fast, although but of a year's growth."

But excitement rose as the party neared Fossil Creek "for the conductor told us when the train slackened up we must get ready to jump for they could not stop a minute."

And so they jumped, while the train moved on to the north, and they found themselves in what seemed like a battlefield "with the ground literally covered with what appeared both from form and color to be cannon balls and bomb shells." In reality, they were looking upon concretions - balls of sediment, many of which concealed the mortal remains of relatively familiar, if over-sized clams and oysters, while others held the coiled or cone-shaped shells of squid-like animals long extinct. One coiled ammonite shell found on the trip measured 28 inches in diameter.

Professor Lakes was now in his element. He said to his students, "You are sitting like mermaids and mermen on the bottom of a primeval, tropical ocean, formed by an arm of the sea which extended from the Gulf of Mexico along the base of these mountains to the Arctic regions. Proofs of its tropical character are in the corals and shells which you have been gathering, which only live and grow in tropical waters."

The author of the Transcript article marveled at the depth and extent of this vast ocean: "How long did it take 7,000 feet of little microscopic insects to live and die and form solid rocks? How long? The world is very old!"

The party spent a long and satisfying day hunting fossils and walking the six miles into Fort Collins to catch a train ride back south.

Lakes worked for Marsh for a few years and made significant discoveries at Como Bluffs, Wyo., many of which Marsh took complete credit for - a not uncommon practice at the time. Lakes was, essentially, a field man.

In 1880, Lakes taught geology and mining at the Colorado School of Mines until he resigned in 1893 to work as a mining magazine editor. He and his sons later became mining consultants. In 1913, he moved to Canada to be closer to family there. That's another interesting synchrony in our lives: my roots go back to England by way of Canada as well.

Lakes' jaw would have dropped to see how the rugged Front Range he traveled with some difficulty has been populated and tamed, but the trains still pass in the shadow of Longs Peak, and sunlight still outlines the concentric rings of shells trapped in the turned earth of subdivisions and parking lots.

The ancient seaway abides.

Many thanks to Beth Simmons for sharing research information uncovered for her upcoming biography of Lakes entitled "The Arthur Lakes Legacy." "Discovering Dinosaurs in the West, The Field Journals of Arthur Lakes" (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), edited by Michael Kohl and John McIntosh, also provides a good read.