An alliance between horses and men to move metal and rock as a way to preserve ancient history played out on a steep northeastern Montana hill this summer.
“Nobody had ever seen anything like it because it was quite a process,” said Saco-area horse trainer Patrick Olson. “I did it for the challenge.”
Olson was hired by Cary Woodruff, inaugural curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science in Miami. The Sisyphean task was to remove three chunks of rock from inside a hole on a cliff-like hillside. The rock, which totaled about 15-feet in length before being broken up to haul, contains the fossilized tail of a Brachylophosaurus canadensis.
The first Tyrannosaurus-rex fossil found in Montana was pulled out by a team of horses, Woodruff noted, but the practice has become rare in these mechanized times.
Dino
Brachylophosaurus was a plant-eating dinosaur, measuring about 20- to 30-feet long and 9-feet tall. The species belonged to the hadrosaurid family which includes ones more commonly known as duck-billed dinosaurs.
Others Brachylophosauruses have been discovered in Montana’s Judith River geologic formation. The most famous was Leonardo, unearthed in the same region. Leonardo was so well preserved that its soft tissues — skin and internal organs — were conserved.
Way back when Leonardo was roaming northeastern Montana, the area would have looked like the Gulf Coast, Woodruff said — warm and watery with beachfront property farther east. Large, slow-moving rivers would have drained into the Western Interior Seaway, which spread from the Arctic Ocean across Montana to the Gulf of Mexico, splitting North America in two.
This latest Brachylophosaurus fossil is significant, Woodruff explained, because it’s tail is entirely intact and shows signs of an injury that healed.
“The public thinks we have one, why do we need another one if they are so common?” Woodruff said.
But he explained that would be like using a red-haired, green-eyed human as the sole example of our species. Having more samples makes it easier to understand variations and see adaptations, he added.
Abandoned
Woodruff, a former Montana State University grad student, knew about the fossil from his previous work in the area. The dinosaur had been found about 10 years ago, but was abandoned after being excavated because removing the slabs was impractical without heavy equipment or a helicopter — both of which are expensive.
Woodruff reached out to Olson to see if his Norwegian fjord-Percheron draft horses, Frosty and Charlie, were capable of dragging the chunks of rock up over the hilltop and down the other side.
“Everyone who told me about Pat said he and his kin were horse people,” Woodruff said. “For Pat, the horses are his life. His world is horses. Watching the way he interacts and engages with the horse was really cool. It was the first time I got to partner with someone who is a true master.”
Olson was a bit skeptical of the task at first.
“Most people would have told him to jump off a bridge,” he joked, but he was intrigued by the challenge.
Olson visited the rugged site and formulated a plan.
“The dinosaur was still kind of cemented in sandstone,” he said, although a protective coating of plaster was surrounding the fossil. “It was basically pulling rock out of a hole.”
Sled
To remove the rocks took “old school, good old farm-and-ranch ingenuity,” Woodruff said.
Malta welder Austin Bunk fabricated a 3-foot-by-9-foot metal sled with runners made of metal tubing and a bed of flat iron straps to carry the boulders. With a tow hook welded on front, the sled weighed 300 to 350 pounds empty, he estimated. The chunks of rock added another 300 pounds.
“It was just a big stone boat,” Woodruff said, comparing it to sleds or sledges farmers use to haul rocks from their fields. “We called it the bone boat.”
To raise the rock to get the sled underneath it, a pipe tepee was erected over the 5-foot-deep hole with a winch at the top to hoist the rock up. Then a chain was attached to the sled and run uphill to the horses.
“It wasn’t just simply pulling in a straight line,” Woodruff said, comparing it to a three-point turn, pulling from one direction and then another.
Olson estimated it was 60-feet to the top of the hill and twice as far down the other side.
Team
Even though the draft horses weigh about 1,200-pounds each — with short, squat, strong bodies and a gentle temperament — Olson said they could not have performed the pull without the help of his saddle horse and volunteers pulling on ropes.
“The farther away from the object of weight, the harder the pull,” he explained.
“It couldn’t have gone any smoother,” he said, adding the reason everything went so well was because of the preparations taken to adapt the horses to the area and task, and ensuring all the helpers understood what to do and where they could, and could not, safely stand. He also praised his son, Zeb, for helping him with the horses.
“No one man did this job, it took all of us to get it done,” Olson said.
After the first rock was safely downhill, Olson said Woodruff was so happy it went smoothly that he wanted to do a backflip.
“I said, ‘Don’t get too excited. We still have two more to go,’ ” Olson recalled.
It took about five hours to remove all three pieces of rock, which were then loaded onto a trailer with a skid steer for the long haul to Miami.
Woodruff said it’s gratifying for him that the museum’s first dinosaur fossil is from Phillips County, Mont.
“I was glad to be in on it,” Olson said. “I probably won’t be pulling any more dinosaurs out.”
