With the brim of his battered cowboy hat tipped down against the sun, Doug Wolfe scans the dusty ground as he heads up a small arroyo in New Mexico's Zuni Basin. There's not much to look at. The gullies here are so dry and the buttes so barren that little more than a few small stunted pines and the odd rattlesnake can scrape out an existence. Still, Wolfe keeps coming back here, month after month, searching for evidence of a time when this desert landscape was lush, green, wet, and dense with dinosaurs.
A rough artistic montage of bones from a dinosaur nicknamed Fred suggests the 3-foot-tall carnivore was fleet-footed. Paleontologist Doug Wolfe says the newly discovered coelurosaur also "likely had a fairly large brain for its body plan."
At the top of the ridge, the paleontologist hunkers down beside a cylindrical boulder streaked with crumbling crystalline rock. He runs his fingers along a series of weathered growth rings. The boulder, a massive fossil, was once the stump of a tree. Wolfe estimates it reached a towering height of some 60 feet about 90 million years ago, part of a thick forest dappled by ancient relatives of the magnolia and fig families. It's a stretch of the imagination, but the arid badlands that reach toward the horizon once were verdant wetlands. Over there, across a broad floodplain, a silty brown stream once meandered lazily on its way to a nearby sea, unburdening itself of sediment. Close by, box turtles burrowed by the edges of a large pond where carnivorous fish armed with needle-sharp teeth basked in the sun like logs, as crocodiles glided by in the shadows. Wolfe shakes his head, as if to throw off the easy disbelief, then says: "It would have been like the Gulf Coast here, with lots of rain and lots of vegetation."
Wolfe has pieced together a remarkably detailed picture of that wild, moist world by analyzing thousands of bone fragments collected by a fossil-hunting team that includes his wife, Hazel, and their son, Christopher, 11. At the site of an ancient pond, just one small part of an ancient boneyard, Wolfe and his team have begun to reconstruct an entire ecosystem. Among their discoveries is a dinosaur paleontologists have never encountered before— a two-legged meat eater 3 feet tall and 6 feet long, with serrated teeth like miniature steak knives and claws that may have been suitable for climbing trees.
