Digging for dinosaurs

Seventy million years ago and more, dinosaurs roamed the land we think of as home. A 6-by-10-foot hole near Glenallen, Mo., has turned up the jaw bone of a hadrosaur, Missouri's official dinosaur, along with two dinosaur hooves, prehistoric turtle shells and the only tyrannosaurus tooth ever found in the Midwest.

The site was discovered in 1942 by a geologist examining a hole where a family was digging a well. He saw bones sticking out of the walls and knew what they were. The Smithsonian Institution paid the family $50 for the bones of a hadrosaur, a duckbilled species that was 25 feet long and had 1,000 teeth.

The dig by a team of volunteers is led by Guy Darrough, an Arnold, Mo., man who has taught himself paleontology and is the curator of the Bollinger County Museum of History. The finds from the dig are stored and displayed and the museum along with Darrough's life-size dinosaur models. Anyone interested in dinosaurs and the history of the area could spend a pleasant day at the museum in Marble Hill.

A compendium compiled by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources lists Glenallen as the only active dinosaur dig site in Missouri. They're digging for dinosaurs right in our own backyard.