The Great Valley Museum's newest display is a dinosaur bone discovered by the geology department at Modesto Junior College.

During a field trip in June of 1996 MJC student Virginia de Long discovered small fragments of dinosaur bone on the ground in the desert east of Green River, Utah. It was not unusual to find small pieces scattered about by erosion, but this find was strange, because the fragments fit together, and some seemed to be sticking out the ground. We were curious and began carefully scraping and sifting the sand and clay from around the bone. More and more bone became visible. In a matter of minutes, they had exposed nearly two feet of…something.We couldn’t tell what it was, but they realized it might be important. We covered the exposed bone with plastic, and reburied everything. It was in plain sight of a heavily traveled road, and could easily have been stolen or destroyed by vandals.

The department contacted the Utah Geological Survey, and they expressed interest in the find. A year later, students from the department met with a state paleontologist to look at the specimen. There was not enough material exposed to determine the identity of the bone, but it was thought at the time that it might be part of stegosaurus. Once again we covered the specimen, with the intention of excavating it at a later time.

When we visited the site one year later, in 1999, the specimen was gone! Worried that it had been plundered, we contacted the Survey again, and found that they had excavated the bone that last winter. They, too, had been worried about the safety of the bone. They had also finally identified it as a cervical vertebra of a Camarasaurus.

This Camarasaurus was a distant relative of the Brontosaurus, and in fact for nearly a century, the skull of a Camarasaurus was perched on the neck of the Brontosaurus in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. As many kids will tell us uninformed adults, the correct name for Brontosaurus is Apatosaurus, meaning ‘headless lizard’. The original specimen had no skull, so another was found for it four hundred miles away, and it was the wrong creature! So it was that for years the Brontosaurus was depicted with the short nose and small rounded skull of a Camarasaurus, when in fact the living Brontosaurus had a skull shaped much more like a horse, with a long snout.