Spring Break Day 4 Part 1

Day four may have been the busiest of all days...after breakfast, we began heading towards Denver to stop by and visit Dinosaur Ridge (www.dinoridge.org)...an amazing location carved into some mountains outside of Denver where you can view real fossilized dinosaur footprints, bones, and more!

And we literally drove THROUGH a mountain to get there haha!

As soon as we arrived, we boarded the bus to take our tour up the mountain road...our tour guide was a student, a paleontologist from a nearby university, and he was full of humor, energy, and information!  More on the awesomeness of the guide later...

Here, at our first stop, is a hillside full of fossilized Iguanodon tracks...Will is actually climbing all over them!

And here he is pointing to one...these are estimated to be over 70 million years old!

Johnny checked out some also!

Then Will checked out some more bones at our second stop - by the way, all of these fossils were accidentally discovered years ago when folks first came through and dynamited the mountain to build the road...talk about luck!

Johnny and Billy posed for a quick photo...

And then checked out some more fossils - I mean, how cool is it that John and Will are actually touching fossils that old!

Our third stop was super cool --- it consisted of a cross-section view of fossilized footprints from herbivores (likely Apatasours)...so what you are seeing are Will and John pushing up on the footprints that were made by the weight of these enormous dinosaurs as they walked and sunk down deep in the mud!

Here is a better explanation :)

We took a few more photos around Dinosaur Ridge then headed inside their museum for some more awesome exhibits...

Here the boys are with an Iguanodon footprint casting...SLIGHTLY enormous...

Here are examples of different types of dinosaur teeth and claws...

I love this - a Brachiosaurus skull!

Triceratops noggin...

More fossilized footprints...

Ha ha ... and triceratops horns...

As we loaded up to continue our journey, I saw this bumper sticker, and of course, had to take a picture :) so funny....I mean, would you rather be in the cretaceous?  Really???

I love that we planned a whole day to give our kids some sort of educational experience...I mean, vacations can be fun AND educational right?

Day 4 Part 2 coming up next!