Raising the Truth

(Editors note: Unless specified otherwise, the use of the terms “Derosas” or “Derosa family” are in reference to Pete DeRosa and his family. Tom DeRosa is of no relation to Pete DeRosa)

May 2002 – A time I had long looked forward to, as I did every May – dig season! I was very excited about that year’s digs since we were to be finishing up the excavation of an Allosaur, a large predatory dinosaur. It isn’t every dig that you get the opportunity to excavate a large predator and I was looking forward to it.

I should take a moment and explain exactly just who I mean when I say ‘we’. By ‘we’, I am referring to the Mt. Blanco Fossil Excavation Team. This team is an all volunteer excavation team that was created by Joe Taylor, curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum in Crosbyton, Texas. On this dig, our team would consist of me, my brother Jordan, Don Yeager, Dave Babbit and last but certainly not least Joe himself.

We were to be joining our friends, the Derosa Family, who had already been on site for about a week leading an excavation tour for Vision Forum. The Vision Forum group consisted of home-school families and other Vision Forum supporters.

I had met the Derosa Family the previous year on a Creation Evidence Museum dig. It was their very first dinosaur excavation - Joe had invited them to the dig to learn how to do dinosaur excavation which was very different than the kinds of excavation that they were used to. Their experience with excavation was with Pleistocene fossils like mammoths and marine fossils such as dugongs and even megalodons (giant sharks). The excavation techniques that are used in those kinds of digs are quite a bit different than the ones used to excavate dinosaurs primarily due to the matrix (the surrounding material) that dinosaurs are typically buried in. Additionally dinosaur fossils are typically much more fragile than Pleistocene fossils which makes the whole process more difficult.

The Derosa Brothers and I in Colorado on a Creation Evidence Museum dig. This picture was taken not far from the Forbes Dig Site where we excavated the Allosaur. From right to left: Peter, Me, Mark.

In May of 2002 we (Jordan, Joe and I) were enroute to the Forbes when Joe received a call from Pete telling us to stay away for a few days because the Derosa’s were shooting a film for Ken Ham of AiG and that our presence was not welcome since Ken Ham had a problem with Joe. We later learned that this was not true, the film was not for AIG and Ken Ham did not have a problem with Joe. The film was for Vision Forum and would later be entitled Raising the Allosaur.

Not wanting to harm any relationship that the Derosas might have had with AIG we agreed to leave and come back after a few days. Fortunately we had a good relationship with another ranch nearby so we spent a few days there with friends.

Finally we went back to the Forbes Ranch, the Vision Forum group was now gone and our part of the dig commenced. This was to be my first time digging on the Forbes Ranch and the Allosaur, though Joe and other members of the Mt. Blanco team had excavated a large part of the Allosaur the previous year with the Derosas and the owner of the land who originally discovered the Allosaur, Dana Forbes.

There were three animals in the area, the Allosaur, a sauropod buried above the Allosaur in very hard rock and another Sauropod on a nearby hill buried in equally hard rock. The Vision Forum group had worked on all three animals, though the most helpful thing they accomplished was removing overburden from off of the Allosaur. (To my knowledge the Vision Forum group did not extract any Allosaur bones from the site.)

After a review of the site it became apparent that the likelihood that the sauropods could be fully extracted from the rock was slim. The rock was far too hard and without a serious investment in time and effort those two animals were in the ground to stay. We did work for several days on both sauropods, but in the end focused our efforts on the Allosaur – it was much easier digging and far more valuable a fossil in every respect. (There are far fewer large predatory therapods than there are large, lumbering sauropods.)

This is an Allosaur, a T-Rex like predatory therapod found in the Jurassic layers of the fossil record. I took this picture while touring Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado. We typically don’t dig on Sunday and usually visit the Monument to get a closer look at the fossils on display. The pictures are used in conjunction with other research material to help us identify bones as they’re excavated. In the case of the Forbes Allosaur we were reasonably sure that we had an Allosaur based on the vertebrae that had been found by Dana Forbes in 2000 and other bones already excavated though we thought there might be a slim chance that it was actually a Ceratosaur. A Ceratosaur is very much like an Allosaur, though it has some striking decorative head structures and is rarer than an Allosaurus.

We picked up where the Vision Forum group had left off. Based on the previous year’s dig we had a pretty good idea where the general location of the skull would be. The Derosas had the homeschool group dig to remove overburden from that area. There was a lot of it to move and finally when they had uncovered a very small piece of bone they stopped, marked the area with survey flags and moved on to other things. This small piece of bone was one of the first things that the Derosa’s pointed out to us. Work began on this area and the area of the caudal (tail) and thoracic (back) vertebrae – the two areas were separated (dis-articulated) likely because of ground shifts after the Allosaur died.

Joe Taylor and Mark Derosa inspect a bone fragment – this fragment later turned out to be a part of the Allosaur’s cervical (neck) vertebrae.

Site overview - Mt. Blanco and Creation Expeditions (The Derosa Family) team members excavating the Allosaur.

Foreground: Working on the tail and back section of the Allosaur. Background: Excavation of overburden around the skull. (Yep that’s a pickaxe, its not all dentil picks and paint brushes like in the movies! In the old days they actually used dynamite too!)

In the early days of the dig the effort was split between the two areas of the Allosaur though eventually as the last of the tail and middle sections were extracted we focused on the area where we had uncovered several articulated cervical vertebrae. We moved several tons of dirt from around this area working to dig a trench around the bones so that we could see where they were going and to make a suitable work area. Before too long we had a nice platform to work on and were ready to remove the articulated cervical vertebral section.

Don Yeager (in red) and Jordan Hall (right) working on the tail section.

This is the area where the cervical vertebral column and skull were excavated. As you can see a lot of overburden was moved. (The previous image picturing the tail section with Don and Jordan was taken from the ledge in the foreground of this picture, though in the opposite direction of this picture.)

Peter Derosa and one of the Forbes boys with the vertebral column before it was removed. The skull was just behind and beneath this field jacket.

While digging around the last buried section of the vertebral column my brother Jordan uncovered a piece of bone that turned out to be the far back right of the animal’s mandible. (The mandible is the lower jaw bone, you have one too; it’s the bone that moves the most when you chew.)

At the time we weren’t sure exactly what it was though after a little work uncovering more and more it soon became clear to Joe and he told us what it was. Eureka! This was what we had been hoping to find the whole dig. Finding an Allosaur is great, finding one with a skull, even better.

We stopped uncovering the skull itself after the first tooth was exposed. This tooth was enough for Joe to finally estimate the animal’s size and skull length.

That night we celebrated and did some math. Based on our initial measurements we estimated the length of the animal at about 22 feet long and around 11 feet tall. Not the largest by any means, though not too shabby either. This was a great find. Joe used this information and wrote a quick email to Vision Forum for use in their press release about the find.

The first tooth immediately after it was found. All of an Allosaur’s teeth are basically the same – they don’t have molars like you or I. This is the back right ‘molar’.

Our first view of the skull - the rear view of the right mandible. Joe estimated the length of the skull based on this view at 32 – 34 inches. The white object in the bottom right of this picture is the field jacket that is protecting the cervical vertebrae.

It only took a few days to excavate the skull, and we took care to expose as little of the skull as possible in order to protect it from harm. The following picture shows the skull at the maximum of exposure. It was not left like this for long – we packed the exposed portions with mud and foil and then put a protective field jacket on as soon as we could.

The Allosaur skull, this was the most anyone saw of it on the dig. We quickly covered it back up and put a field jacket on it while we excavated around the rest of it. This protected it from the elements and from us as we worked at extricating it safely from the ground. What a beautiful sight.

After the skull was fully excavated and protected by a reinforced field jacket, it was lowered down the side of the hill to a waiting truck. It was then hauled out of the canyon to a U-HAUL truck. Once it and the rest of the Allosaur bones excavated on the dig were safely loaded the Derosa brothers, Peter and Mark, along with Daniel Burns drove it back to Joe’s Museum in Crosbyton, Texas where we all believed it would remain until we began the restoration work that summer. (By ‘all’ I am referring to the Mt. Blanco team, we had no idea of the treachery to come.)

Jordan, Joe and I went on to a Creation Evidence Museum dig on a nearby ranch for two weeks and then after that we met back up with the Derosa family and headed off to Montana to another dig.

The first few days in Montana were great, though it wasn’t long until the weather turned bad and I became ill. The roads had been washed out due to rain and the Derosa family took excellent care of me in their motor home for several days until I could be taken to a nearby hospital. As it turned out my mysterious illness was mononucleosis or mono as it is more commonly known. Disaster! Mono effectively ends whatever it was you were doing and demands that you rest for several weeks to months. Given this diagnosis the dig was over for me.

After the dig was over Pete Derosa called me to tell me that he and Joe were having a disagreement over the Allosaur. At the time I didn’t realize what he made the call for other than to let me know what was going on since he considered me a friend. As I look back and at the events that have transpired since I’m not so sure. Certainly it appears now that he might have been trying to ascertain whether or not I was going to be a problem for him as he worked to push Joe out of his 3rd of the Allosaur.

I didn’t think much of it at the time as I was just getting over mono, catching up on work and spending most of my free time with my fiancé. Little did I know that my friend Joe and my friends the Derosas would soon be embroiled in a dispute over the Allosaur and that Vision Forum, Led by Doug Philip’s, would be leading the Assault against Joe as they backed the Derosas and the soon to be released Vision Forum movie – Raising the Allosaur.

Sigh, what a terrible end to such a great beginning…

Phillip Hall