Museums
Ruth Hall Museum of Paleontology The Ghost Ranch Abiquiu, New Mexico
The land at the Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico has many stories to tell, but let's start with the enormous dinosaur burial ground. In 1947 Edwin Colbert, a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, led a fossil-hunting expedition into the desert about 60 miles north of Santa Fe. Near the tiny town of Abiquiu, on a remote dude ranch, Colbert made one of the most spectacular finds in the history of paleontology. On an exposed cliff face, in a layer of 215-million-year-old mudstone no more than two feet thick, he discovered a mass grave containing hundreds of dinosaur skeletons packed together, many almost perfectly complete. At the time they were the earliest complete dinosaur fossils on record, dating from the end of the Triassic Period. Nearly every single skeleton belonged to just one genus, Coelophysis. The agile, bipedal predator, not much taller than a small child, was the forerunner of giants that would make the earth tremble for the next 150 million years.
While Colbert was digging his dinosaurs, a reclusive resident of Ghost Ranch worked nearby, making her own careful study of the desert's secrets, observing its magnificent sky, its flowers, buttes, and bleached cattle bones with a mystic's passion. In time, Georgia O'Keeffe would become another Ghost Ranch legend. She lived on or near the ranch until 1984, constantly seeking and finding fresh perspectives in the ancient terrain.
Ghost Ranch remains a land beyond time. A visitor quickly discovers that the bold streaks of color in O'Keeffe's paintings were not an exaggeration. Indeed, Earth's ages are starkly reflected in the white limestone remnants of seabeds and the red and yellow sandstone bluffs that were desert dunes when dinosaurs walked this land. O'Keeffe's house still stands, not far from one of the world's richest dinosaur fossil beds. The former dude ranch is now a retreat center owned by the Presbyterian Church, and it remains a powerful draw for artists and paleontologists alike. It remains a shrine to Coelophysis, New Mexico's official state fossil, complete with a small but fascinating adobe museum built around an eight-ton block of fossil-laden mudstone quarried from the same cliff first excavated by Edwin Colbert.
