Last October, India Wood found herself back on the sage- and juniper-dotted terrain where she had made a magical discovery back in 1979. Wood, then 12, was out exploring a family friend’s cattle ranch in northwestern Colorado when she spotted what she knew was a fossil sticking up out of the dirt.
That’s a moment of excitement that will brand you for life.
Over three summer visits to the ranch with her older sister Kate, Wood amassed a collection of 18 bones from a dinosaur dating to the Late Jurassic period. Many trips to the library back home in Colorado Springs enabled the young detective to identify the bones she had unearthed as parts of a mighty Allosaurus. Elmer’s glue aided her attempts to put the puzzle back together. She stored the bones in shoe boxes beneath her bed and named the piecemeal creature “Alice.”
A few years later, Wood was finally able to get some of the fossils in front of a paleontologist. At age 16, she was hired to help excavate the rest of the remaining skeleton that had amazingly survived millions of years, encased in mudstone. Today, that toothy meat-eater is one of the most impressive specimens at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
Kirk Johnson — who was lead scientist at DMNS for years and is now director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. — was so taken with the fact that a 12-year-old discovered and helped excavate the long-extinct predator that he made sure her story was featured in its exhibition and invited her back as a 28-year-old for the ribbon cutting.
Johnson and Wood have remained friends. He calls her an explorer by nature who will always be looking for the next adventure. But her first one will live in the annals of paleontology forever.
“It’s an epic story of the American West,” is how he describes Wood’s discovery near the Moffat County cattle ranch then managed by friends of her parents, the late Colorado writer-photographers Myron and Nancy Wood. Three Springs Ranch includes part of the fossiliferous Morrison Formation from around 150 million years ago — back when a bipedal creature with serrated teeth and three-clawed hands stood at the top of the food chain in what is now Colorado.
Wood, now 57, is living in Boulder and working on a coming-of-age memoir called “The Dinosaur’s Daughter.” She’s also writing about a more recent adventure that she has been speaking about to groups around the state: crisscrossing Colorado on foot.
But you don’t dig up a dinosaur and then just forget about it and move on with your life. “Her dinosaur always comes back to haunt her,” said Johnson. And the Allosaurus fossils were not the last she found. After moving to New England for college, Wood could not stop thinking about the site. So as a 19-year-old undergrad student, she persuaded Dartmouth College, the Carnegie Foundation and Shell Oil Company to fund a dig back at that same location because she sensed there was more to be found in Alice’s graveyard. She was right.
Wood’s field team uncovered bones of a pterosaur, an early mammal, as well as fish, crocodilians, lizards, turtles, frogs, salamanders, shrimp, clams, snails, ferns and horsetail plants. She then co-authored a paper with Harvard scientists about the findings, describing the ancient ecosystem. She believed there was much more to be found, but she went to grad school, got married and went into business as a marketer.
It would be decades before she would have the chance to be involved in another scientific expedition there.
Which brings us to last October. Wood’s 30-year marriage had just ended, and she was busy writing, speaking and searching for a publisher for her travel memoir about a pandemic-era nature quest she had undertaken. In 2020 and 2022, Wood hiked two 750-mile diagonals across Colorado in an X-shaped trek from corner to corner and corner to corner.
Wood’s personal narratives appeal to a broad range of groups, from the Rocky Mountain Map Society to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which held its annual meeting in Denver Feb. 15-17 and included a panel on fossils, in which India participated. (Her next talk will be before the Sterling Livestock Commission on Feb. 26.)
Along her hikes, Wood met rural landowners, photographed wild animals, and gained a sense of the water resource problem our state’s growing population faces. The experience left her both worried, informed and renewed. “People say, ‘Oh, my God, Colorado’s being loved to death,’ but in 98 percent of the state nobody goes there. Try walking an X across the state and see how many people you meet,” she said.
One of the diagonals led Wood back to the scene of her childhood dinosaur discovery. Three Springs Ranch, which was sold to new owners last year, is a place of refuge for Wood that appears mostly unchanged even as her interests and circumstances continue to evolve. Wood admits that her connection to that land is maybe the longest-lasting relationship of her life.
“I know it so well, and also know the history of the immigrant invasion that pushed out the Utes who used to live in the area,” Wood noted. She knows about hidden pictographs in a canyon and the stories of tough Colorado women who lived and died in that corner of the state bordering Utah and Wyoming. “That’s the other part of why I like it up there; the women didn’t take any crap.”
India Wood may not be a household name (even though it sounds as if it should be), but in American paleontology she is legendary. Which is why last fall, a group of researchers from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History invited her to join them back at the ranch, and on nearby Bureau of Land Management property. The group was there to search for micro-vertebrate fossils. They knew she could help.
The rugged landscape that lies about halfway between the tiny towns of Maybell and Dinosaur is known to scientists as the Wolf Creek Paleontological Site. The Peabody’s collection manager, Vanessa Rhue, was excited to have Wood on-site during their four-day field survey.
“It was an absolute delight to meet India; she has a long history with the outcrops,” Rhue said. “Her expertise was invaluable to understanding where they had done work in the past, to look at old field photographs and align with topography still present today.”
The team took rock samples back to Yale for micro-CT scanning. The technology allows them to see what’s inside the rock without damaging any tiny fossils. Rhue said the Allosaurus’s old quarry is covered by a lot of overburden that would take considerable time, money and personnel to remove. It remains to be determined whether they will seek permits for a proper dig. If they do, Wood will no doubt be there.
During that nearly 1,500-mile hike crisscrossing the state, Wood at times had companions, including one of her daughters. But much of the time Wood was on her own with no human distractions to keep her from seeing, smelling, hearing and feeling Colorado.
She can now speak authoritatively about drought and the shrinking prairies that are threatening Colorado’s wildlife.
“What possessed me? I needed it,” Wood said. “I felt like I had lost track of that Allosaurus-finding India. That inquisitive, curious, confident woman.”
