5th Stop - Dinosaur Ridge

The next stop on our Colorado adventure was to the Dinosaur Ridge on Wednesday.  Given our full day (read exhaus-tion) from our hike on Tuesday, we got off to a nice late start that morning.  The Dinosaur Ridge is a place about an hour outside of Denver where there are some dinosaur fossils and similar items.  Apparently, the area of Denver in prehistoric times was able to preserve a number of dinosaur fossils & my dad is a big fan of anything dinosaur, so we went to check it out.  

We first stopped for lunch in the town near the Dinosaur Ridge, called Morrison.  It is a very small little mountain town with a few shops & restaurants and not much else.  Kind of had that ol' west ghost town feeling (only it was still inhabited!).  The restaurant had just about every type of animal you can hunt out there stuffed & mounted (& named with a plaque!).  So, we snapped a few pictures of Mackenzie in front of them.  

After lunch, we were off to the ridge.  We took the bus tour due to the heat & got out at each site to check it out.  We saw some of the fossils in the rock.  Then, we saw bulges, where apatosaurus

(new official name for the bronto-saurus, as I knew it) feet had sunk down in the sand as they walked & the bulge was preserved.  And the last stop was the coolest I thought- there was a place in the rock where the footprints of two dinosaurs (forgot their names....) were preserved.  When we stood back & took a picture, you could see the prints going all over the place on the rock.  Pretty cool.