Dinosaur Quest

Posted On October 18, 2025

One Man’s Journey Backward Through Time

Who else besides me grew up watching the morning cartoon “Jonny Quest”? Dr. Quest, Race Bannon, Jonny himself, Hadji, and of course, their dog Bandit. From remote jungle to sea floor, spanning the globe on one peril filled adventure of discovery after another. I still to this day enjoy watching Jonny Quest re-runs on TV’s BOOM Network.

My own discovery quests are comparatively tame. They involve far fewer encounters with evil villains like Jonny Quest’s Doctor Zin. My most recent effort involved dredging two feet of accumulated muck & sludge from this drought stricken year’s remnants of what has for the last thirty plus years been my main pond.

A little over thirty years ago, shortly after my wife and I purchased our home, we had a hair curling mid-winter adventure that left us and our then infant daughter buried engine deep in a snowbank in my Ford Ranger pickup. While we escaped unscathed, the same could not be said for my truck. The body came through intact, but the truck’s transmission did not. Not long after the accident, I sold the truck from my front yard for $900.

Early the following spring, I put that money to use. There was a good sized water filled depression out back on my lot that I was pretty sure was spring fed. Wanting to add a nice duck pond to our property, I got ahold of a guy with a backhoe. “Dig me $900 worth of pond.”

So that’s what he did. He moved dirt and banked it up nice, thirty yards wide by fifty yards long, straight down to bedrock in the deeper end’s pool, complete with an island.

I had it dredged out once previously, about fifteen years ago. Another guy with a backhoe took the main pool nearly back down to bedrock, adding island #2 in the process. It’s been a waterfowl mecca ever since.

But over the ensuing decade and a half, my main pond’s deepest pool had slowly filled back in with oozing mud, muck & silt. As this year’s droughtlike conditions continued, my pond’s water level dropped to the point that it was nothing more than a swampy smelling muck filled mudpuddle hole. As fall’s foliage turned towards October, with the ground rock hard and what remained of my pond nearly devoid of water, I remarked to my wife, “If there was ever a time to have Main Pond dredged back out, now is that time.” She agreed. So that’s what we did.

I’ve spent the summer hand dredging out some of my smaller ponds, but I knew that this project was way too big to be dug out by hand.So I contacted my go to contractor, Bach & Co. Their job supervisor came and surveyed the task, then sent two men with machines, an excavator and a skid steer. One day’s digging later, they had my main pond cleaned out and it’s deepest pool dredged back down to smooth bedrock.

A few short days after men & machines had departed, my wife and I were out surveying the results, when much to our astonishment, we discovered that Main Pond had already acquired a dinosaur tenant. Burrowing into the muck left in one of the undulating bedrock’s pondbed troughs, a big snapping turtle had claimed what precious water was left as his home.

In our efforts to get a closer look at the turtle, we ventured down onto the bedrock. It was pool table smooth, with several gentle undulations and one steeper slope. We stood there on time frozen waves, millions of years old.

It occurred to me, in that moment, that it was as if we had uncovered a previously unread page from earth’s geolocial book. In Questlike fashion, I decided that I wanted to read it. So, over the course of the next three days, with shovel, broom & bucket, I carefully cleaned and swept the last layer of silt from its page.

Though I did take pains to leave the snapping turtle his newly claimed quarters.

I didn’t know excactly what I was searching for, or what I would find. Maybe I would discover some previously unknown species of dinosaur. So I carefully scraped and swept. The beddrock was smooth and hard, but aside from several small interesting wormlike fossil imprints, my initial quest efforts produced nothing of note.

Then, finally, as I spot cleaned different areas with a water bottle, there it was! Down along one corner where the bedrock dipped, I discovered a dinsosaur.

After a good bit of online Google & Wikipedia research, I believe this fossil is from the Cambrian Period, from a family of shelled creatures called nautiliods, over 400 million years old. I think this particular one may be of a prehistory creature called Orthocerus. Appaerently, most of them died out with the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period, though several modern day relatives still to this day survive.

Not long afterwards, lo & behold, I found yet another!

Feeling Jonny Questlike, I continued my search, but did not find another. That’s okay though, taking lessons learned from watching reruns of vintage cartoon TV shows, when questing for dinosaurs,

encountering two is enough.

Espeically when they are guarded by a living decendant.

**********

Until Our Trails Cross Again:

ADKO

Author’s Endnote:

A Post Rainfall Dino Quest Update

I went back out to survey my main pond dinosaur quest site on the Monday morning after the first significant post pond dredge rain. As I had hoped, even the mere inch of rain we received that Sunday night began re-filling Main Pond’s undulating troughs. It also thoroughly rinsed the pondbed’s exposed bedrock off nicely.

I also discovered my dinosaur turtle had moved! Sometime during the night’s rain, he had left his mud filled trough and climbed the steepest bedrock wave to take up residency in what is generally one of Main Pond’s most consistently filled holes.

Then, as I climbed down onto the bedrock myself to get a closer look the snapping turtle and continue my quest for more fossils. the overnight rain’s rinse rewarded me by revealing not one, but TWO additional previously undiscovered nautiloids!

Finally, as I was exiting the pond bed, I had yet another exciting encounter. A SECOND dinosaur snapping turtle had taken up residency in my quickly reconstituting Main Pond.

Positioning himself to guard the bridge accessing the smaller of Main Pond’s two islands.

Stating emphatically…

NONE SHALL PASS!!!