Southwest of Denver, just above the rivers of traffic flowing north and south on C-470, lies an ancient geological wonderland.
Visitors routinely see stegosauri of many colors — brown, green, pink, multicolored and a red-white-and blue one sporting Uncle Sam's hat.
Children may safely touch the tongue of an iguanodon and stare into a cold green theropod eye.
Those guys are replicas. But there are also real dinosaur tracks left by herds of iguanodons that roamed Colorado millions of years before the buffalo, and evidence of long-gone mangrove swamps.
The story of Dinosaur Ridge is 280
Tour guide Thornton Giese shows Lucas Dreith, 5, one of many exhibits.
million years old, and people who stroll its one-mile road can see and ponder its history, rock layer by rock layer.Few see it these days. At sunset on a recent November afternoon, as the rivers of C-470 traffic turn red, a lone man walks the road as rabbits and deer and raptors emerge.
Scientists have studied this area for more than a century. Until recently, the ancient wonders unearthed along this mile were available to everyone at no charge on a road called Dinosaur Freeway.
Four years ago, the Colorado Department of Transportation donated the Dinosaur Ridge road to Jefferson County and the city of Lakewood. An intergovernmental agreement closed it to all but authorized vehicles, partly to protect the dinosaur tracks from traffic.
It remains free to hikers and bikers and buses full of schoolchildren, and to cars with wheelchairs on their license plates.
For others, there is a charge to travel through 280 million years of geologic time: $5 a head for a guided bus tour.
That's a good thing, according to Sue Kaberline, who works at the Dinosaur Ridge gift shop. In warm weather, hundreds of kids arrive in school buses for a history lesson here, and "It's like herding cats out there. You know how kids are," Kaberline said.
A lost fourteener
About 280 million years ago, Mount Morrison was not a foothill west of Denver. It was a magnificent mountain, rivaling Mount Evans and Pikes Peak.
Over eons, Morrison eroded away, contributing to the deep black dirt that now underlies Iowa and Illinois.
Meanwhile, about 140 million years ago, when Earth was a bit warmer than today, what we call Colorado lay under water. A vast inland sea, 600 miles wide, stretched from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
As the sea receded, brontosauruses tramped through, leaving round bulges in the mud visible today on Dinosaur Ridge. Later, herds of iguanodon — elephant-sized herbivores that could walk on two or four feet
The Dinosaur Ridge museum in Morrison offers educational exhibits on the types of creatures that roamed Colorado millions of years ago.
— tramped across the water's edge, leaving hundreds of tracks on what is now a steep hillside overlooking the ridge.Crisscrossing the iguanodon tracks, theropods resembling ostriches or emus left birdlike imprints in the same mud.
Elsewhere on the ridge road are obvious signs in the hardened sand and mud that Colorado has a tropical history — impressions of mangrove roots.
About 65 million years ago those wet years ended. Violent movements of plates beneath the Earth's crust thrust up the range of Rocky Mountains we see today. The thrust lifted the ground under the sea into an almost vertical ridge — what we call the hogback, because it looks like the spine of an Arkansas hogback.
The multicolored layers of sand and mud deposited for 100 million years or so became what we call Red Rocks Park and Roxborough State Park and the Garden of the Gods.
Melvin Glerup, a retired geologist with Texaco, taps a dinosaur track with a green stick. He wears red-white-and-blue suspenders and sneakers.
"Anyone know what an omnivore is?" he asks.
A girl from a fourth-grade class in Silverton raises her hand. "Someone who eats eggs?"
Glerup shows the children a pattern of theropod tracks, inviting them to guess how big the animal was and how far it hopped on a single step.
Then he taps what looks like a big round dinosaur track. "What's this?"
A boy raises his hand. "A longneck?"
Wrong answer. That circle was created recently by someone who stole a dinosaur track.
Down below in the gift shop, Brian Davidson, a onetime student of ancient Greek and Roman history, answers questions about older inhabitants of the planet.
What colors were the dinosaurs?
Brown or green, but someone recently found "orange skin on a theropod," Davidson says. "Very exciting."
In the exhibit hall nearby, the stolen dinosaur track has been returned.
Markus, a pale 6-year-old boy, rubs a hand over it.
"I'm a 2,000-million big fan of dinosaurs," he says, the biggest number he can imagine.
And what does he want to be? "A paleontologist!"
He pronounces it perfectly.
DINOSAUR RIDGE Family-friendly exhibits and dinosaur trails. Fossils, dinosaur tracks, exhibit hall, snack bar, gift shop and more. Many special events. 16831 W. Alameda Parkway, Morrison. 303-697-3466 or dinoridge.org