Como Bluff — Apatosaurus ("Bertha")

Como Bluff, along an anticline ridge near Medicine Bow, Wyoming, is one of the historic dinosaur localities of North America — a Morrison Formation ridge that produced some of the first great sauropod skeletons during the 19th-century Bone Wars. From 1994 to 1997 I worked here across multiple summer seasons as part of a Dinamation / Casper College research project under the direction of Dr. Robert T. Bakker. It was my first experience digging dinosaurs alongside a world-famous paleontologist, and it set the course for everything that followed.

The work recovered Apatosaurus material from the Morrison Formation, with associated Allosaurus material present. The specimen we called “Bertha” was central to the effort. Bertha was an Apatosaurus that had become mired upright in mud and died standing — and the element we recovered was her pubis, a massive sauropod hip bone.

Years later, my Como Bluff dig partner James Filla sent me a cast he had made of an Allosaurus atrox left manus — the hand, with its big recurved claw.

A cast of the left manus of Allosaurus atrox — the hand and its recurved claw — made and sent by dig colleague James Filla (Nederland, Colorado, 1994); the original was found at Como Bluff.

Como Bluff is hard ground to work. The bone-bearing layers are smectitic clays that swell and crack as they dry, so every specimen needed careful stabilization before it could be lifted. Each season ran roughly two weeks and covered the full field cycle — prospecting, excavation, mapping, jacketing, preparation, documentation, and public interaction — worked through desert heat and sudden thunderstorms, with the crew based out of the historic Virginian Hotel in Medicine Bow.

Working beside Bakker meant the science never stopped at the quarry wall — it carried on into long evenings of sketches and argument about how these animals actually lived. This record preserves modern excavation at a historically significant locality and its place in the ongoing Apatosaurus / Brontosaurus research story.