Monday, December 20, 1999
Dino fever has CHS students kicking up dust
By Bill Whitaker
With only a few days remaining before Christmas, a dozen Cooper
High School students will soon be retiring to their beds, visions
of dinosaur dung and carnivore teeth and reptilian vertebrae dancing
merrily in their heads.
They’ve got dino fever — and it’s been infecting
them silly several weeks now.
Just ask science teacher Scott Clark. Only last week, a student
was serving her detention time for some campus offense by helping
in the tedious, time-consuming task of cleaning up fossilized
dinosaur vertebrae in a classroom lab, “and now she’s
asking if she can come back and do more work on it.”
Never doubt the power of dinosaurs in the 20th century —
or, for that matter, the 21st.
“Her detention may end up determining her entire career,”
popular Cooper High art teacher and off-hours dinosaur bone-hunter
Larry Millar said. “You know, when you mention dinosaurs,
it connects immediately with students. That’s why dinosaurs
are such wonderful learning tools.”
And to “dig” them literally — that’s the
living end, so to speak.
Last month Larry and Scott, along with fellow teachers Marsha
Morgan and Martha Weatherl, led a dozen academically superior
students out to the rugged Terlingua area — and right at
the height of the infamous Terlingua chili cookoff — to spend
several days digging for dinosaurs with paleontologist Ken Barnes.
That included hiking a mile and a half onto private property
each day, then spending hours turning the stubborn soil under
a merciless sun.
“One thing became apparent about these particular dinosaurs
right off,” 17-year-old bone-seeker Scott Barnabo said. “They
sure could’ve died in an easier spot.”
“Yeah,” 18-year-old A.J. Lewis quipped, “they
picked the hottest, driest spot to go extinct!”
Where they lay
Engineered by the Cooper teachers through yet another dinosaur-seeker,
Homer Montgomery of the University of Texas at Dallas, the hunt
is being hailed as something of a first for high school students
in Texas. Cooper students and faculty raised money to head off
to Big Bend, there to spend their hours seeking and studying the
Lone Star State’s prehistoric past.
Cooper High officials say they’d like to see it become
a regular pursuit for students.
That’s not to say any of it was easy. In fact, it wasn’t
long before several misperceptions about dead and buried dinosaurs
arose.
“Really, I thought we’d just have whole skeletons
sitting out there, just beneath the surface, waiting for us,”
18-year-old Steffany Stewart admitted. “I was thinking we
were going to go out there, move a little dirt around, and that
an entire dinosaur would be there. But that wasn’t the way
it was. The bones were all spread out.”
Some students got into digging more than others, such as 16-year-old
Donna Inscho, who earned the nickname “Pit Dog” for
her passionate devotion to the dig. That sterling quality earned
her a coveted spot in the pit when it came time to delicately
remove dinosaur fossils from the crumbling soil and bring them
into the light of day.
“I won’t say any of it was easy,” Donna said.
“There’s a lot of rock and it’s hot and you have
to drink a lot of water. Of course, the thought of doing all that
manual labor and hitting the rocks just right and hauling dirt
away may not be the most fun thing, but once you get down to the
bones it really does get interesting.”
What big teeth
The Cooper students, plus teacher Marsha Morgan’s daughter
Amy, an Abilene High student, even brought along some of their
own tools. At least one local dentist furnished some of his hand-held
teeth-cleaning equipment for the meticulous chore of scraping
dirt away from fragile dinosaur bones and dinosaur dung.
He didn’t ask for any of his tools back.
Among other things, students helped extract bones from both
adult and juvenile Edmontosaurus and Chasmosaurus specimens, the
former a duck-billed dinosaur, the latter more in line with the
horned Triceratops so popular in movies. Carnivore teeth were
also uncovered. But it was coprolite — fossilized dinosaur
dung — that most fascinated the students.
“That’s definitely what it was,” Larry said,
showing off one of these prehistoric dino chips, “because
Ken has been in touch with the leading dinosaur dung authority
in the world and she has certified this as the real poop. I mean,
it’s the real thing. Funny thing is, the kids will pick it
up and immediately smell it. That tears me up!”
Cooper teachers and students displayed their gratitude to CHS
principal Jim Short by presenting him with a piece of the dinosaur
dung.
“We gave it to Mr. Short,” Marsha deadpanned, “as
a token of our great esteem for him.”
Principal Short has doubts about that but is supporting the
program anyway, including yet another likely dig involving Cooper
students this February as well as continuing post-dig clean-up
work on many of the fossils already recovered. As for the dino
dung itself, he graciously accepted it.
“But,” he assured me later, “I think there’s
a great deal of symbolism to this!”
Bill Whitaker, who understands Cooper students wanted to
give their principal a little of what he’s given them, can
be reached at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com.
Send a Letter to the Editor about This
Story | Start or Join A Discussion about This Story
Send the URL (Address)
of This Story to A Friend:
Copyright ©1999, Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews
/ E.W. Scripps. Publications
| 
