House Full o’ Fossils: Man Loves Dinosaurs More Than You
Monday, May 21st, 2012
Dinosaur archaeologist. Those words conjure up a lot of school and a highly-educated lab-coat-wearing stereotype for most of us, right? Or at the least monologue-spouting dinosaur-loving cast of Jurassic Park, right?
Then there’s 78 year-old Ray Stanford, Maryland’s ‘Dinoman’ who skipped all that.
While all the dinosaur science people and some of the best dinosaur fossil hunters in the country proclaimed that Maryland wasn’t worth their time and has yielded only minimal finds like a few teeth and a couple of footprints, Ray, a self-taught naturalist, has a house FULL of evidence that somehow everyone missed!
Ray’s home, appropriately called the Stanford Museum, houses one of the most significant collections of fossils on the east coast. Even professionals peruse Standford’s collection in awe.
While most of the collection is fairly typical, if you can forget you’re actually in someone’s house, containing footprints and teeth, there are some incredible finds like a footprint that doesn’t even have a matching fossil record at this point as well as the complete skeleton of a baby dinosaur called a Nodosaur (which has been moved to the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum).
Somebody call John Hammond and let him know about Ray so we can get things started on our new theme park.
[The Washington Post]