Newspaper Article

MIKE GOODSON: Alabama once 'sweet home' for dinosaurs

Goodson, Mike

2010

Overview

  Ice Age animals have been found throughout Alabama, ranging from large mammoth teeth to fossilized horse teeth and giant crocodile teeth. More than half of Alabama was covered by the ocean millions of years ago, and large sharks, cretaceous fish and giant mosasaurs were prevalent in these waters. Remains of those creatures are found almost every day in the creeks and rivers of south Alabama. The finds include Basilasaurus, an extinct whale that is the state fossil of Alabama. Barnum Brown, a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History, set out for Montana, having promised officials of the museum that he would \"get them a dinosaur.\" Four months later, he returned with the skeletons of nine huge dinosaurs, about 80,000,000 years old, that he had dug up near Billings, Mont. He also had the remains of a reptile 185,000,000 years old that he had disinterred near Cameron, on the Colorado River, in Arizona. He found an arrow point in a cave 50 miles from Carlsbad, N.M., that he believed supported his theory that men had inhabited the North American continent 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.

• Publisher: Halifax Media Group
• Subject: Brown, Barnum