Ep 203: Capitalsaurus and other sewer dinosaurs
Sewersauruses
A wise man once told me you can’t believe everything you find in the dirt. Much like pocket cash, the best type of treasures that we find are the ones we don’t go looking for. Unexpected finds are the best.
Sometimes, people have made unexpected finds in the process of digging or stirring things up for other purposes. One of the things you find is you are not going to find a lot of the same things that you would find down here. City diggers have found a lot of strange stuff over the years. But, in short, there is one find that stands out above all others and leads to a very misleading headline.
The DC dinosaur.
This story and the headline in it presents this dinosaur fossil as if it was found in a Washington DC sewer. That would be cool, however, it would also beg the question, how the heck did the bones get into the sewer or was the sewer somehow accidentally built around the dinosaur, which is also stupid.
It is misleading to say that these dinosaur bones were found in the sewers of these various cities. Rather, what happens is when they go digging to lay the infrastructure, workers discover dinosaur fossils. This is one of the many things that serves as a reminder of what this place would have once been like and many of the things which were out there.
This episode discusses some prominent moments where the digging of sewers led to the discovery of fossils, bones, and dinosaurs.
-
In the mid 1850’s many major cities began digging and putting in the infrastructure needed for sewers and sewer systems. This is, as we have discussed in the past, a way to deal with rising health and safety concerns which were popping up in areas where there were more and more people concentrated.
What is weird, is though this search began as the Washington DC sewer dinosaur, named colloquially online the capitalsaurus, it led to a number of discoveries that were very similar in nature.
In the middle of the 1800s they decided to do some work to address the ongoing concern of city growth. That work was to install a system of pipes that would be designed to transport the nastiest byproduct of the human person away. The sewers in question are not the plumbing sewer lines that come from your home. This is rather referring to the sewers that are much deeper underground that those sewers dump out into.
They’re way down and when they dig them, it is common for these type sewers to be buried about 100 feet before the surface. That’s way down. And so while the regular sewer line might only be 6-10 feet down, the big one lies much farther down than that. So, as the story goes, in 1898 construction workers were excavating the area near First and F street. When they were digging, they uncovered what was later determined to be part of a dinosaur vertebra as well as other bone fragments in the region.
They found so many different fragments in this area that paleontologists say they aren’t even really sure what the dinosaur would have actually looked like. Sometimes, keep in mind, when they try to say what the dinosaurs of old look like, they play like bone legos with no instructions. And sometimes the completed set is a little off from the model on the box. So there is a bit of a guessing game, could also be that they are not even all of the same dino, just a thought.
The bones they found while digging for the sewer vary in many ways. The tail bone was the best piece and based on part of the tail they have done a lot to try and figure out what they are going to call the thing. They started with Creosaurus, but it turned out that name was already taken that couldn’t possibly be this dinosaur, again based solely on the tail bone. Then they said man the dinosaur tail piece we found on this Washington DC sewer dinosaur tail is oddly similar to the tail bone piece of a dinosaur we found in New Jersey named Dryptosaurus.
The tailbone of the dinosaur went to the Smithsonian where it lived for decades. But then they looked at the tailbone a little more, which, how are you still looking at this same piece of bone and scrutinizing it after all that time. And they said, “Actually, it isn’t like the Dryptosaurus, and is likely something totally different. Again, off a tailbone.
This stuff is a guess. Like honestly it’s an educated guess, and finally they said it’s its own thing and called it capitalsaurus and that was the end of it. But the trouble was the guy who called it that didn’t follow the bone dinosaur rules for what you call stuff and it was not a scientific designation. However, the name stuck and it is the official dinosaur of Washington's dino now. The site of the discovery is called capitalsaurus court and January 28 is Capitalsaurus day… the more you know.
But, what became evident is this is not the first time someone has found a dinosaur skeleton when digging for a sewers.
Other Sewersauruses
More recent and a little closer to us here in the pacific northwest than Washington DC, was the discovery of Albertasaurus. As the story goes, Canadian workers found large dinosaur bones while digging a sewer tunnel in the city of Edmonton.
They actually found two different fossils or pieces of bone, one being a tooth and another being a part of a limb bone which belong to two different dinosaurs. One, the Edmontosaurus and the other the Albertasaurus. These names really start to sound made up and as you can tell they are mostly named for where they are discovered.
The Edmontasaurus is one of those weird shaped stupid looking dinosaurs that when you look at it, you think, of course that thing didn’t make it. It’s big, eats plants, and is essentially just a big meal for a bigger, more gnarly dino.
A bigger, more nasty dino like Albertasaurus. Albertasaurus is technically like a t rex, but one which lived in like where Canada is now. All I can think is that it is a snow dino, and that’s fun!
They found these bone parts as they were digging for a sewer in Edmonton Alberta. Add that to the list of sewer dinosaurs.
Another sewersaurus was in New Zealand. They were doing a wastewater system expansion in Auckland New Zealand, they began to excavate huge vertical shafts in order to make the upgrade. When they did so, they dug through a fossil bed and found what is reported as a once in a lifetime find was somewhere around 300,000 fossils. It is estimated that there were 266 different fossil species. It’s interesting because they note for this many species to be found in this location like this, it would require a couple of things: elevated water levels AND water to recede in places where there were depressions and when the dead animals settle to the bottom in those locations, they are fossilized together, resulting in these multi organism findings.
It’s as if there was like a big flood that helped kill all those individual animals and things and deposited them in that way.
In this mess they found whale vertebrae, whale teeth, a sawshark spine, eagle rays dental plates, great white shark teeth, flax snails. There were no dinosaurs found in this find, but there were another number of fossils and they are connected to our topic because again they were discovered as a sewer was being dug.
In Michigan in 2022, workers who were constructing a drain to lead into the sewers found the remains of a mastodon. Could you imagine, you’re just doing your job, digging a big old hole and poking out there is an elephant shaped thing in the middle of Michigan.
And while we could speak for some time about these finds, I think it is more valuable to ask ourselves… why are these dinosaur bones and other fossils of ancient animals found so near where we now dig for sewers?
Why the sewersauruses
While we already said it, one of the biggest reasons sewer work leads to the number of finds that it does, is the sheer level of digging down a person has to do to get low enough for the sewers. In many cases, this is the longest that part of the earth has gone untouched, only to be touched by excavation.
But… there’s a lot of land, so… why do they keep hitting bone deposits on sewer digs. Many cities are built along waterways or other natural occurring features which provide some type of infrastructure support to the city itself. Some of these have existed for thousands of years, though the cities that now are associated with them are not.
Often these can be lowland or lowlying areas or things that derive from natural streams. Just as ancient animals and people would gather near rivers for water, foraging, and hunting, modern society is built along rivers and streams for the support it provides the people who live there.
When those people begin digging down to bury the things which will carry and direct their waste, they will have a greater chance of finding these bones and fossils. Coupled with early excavation of these sewers specifically in parts of the country to be shown to have a high concentration, led to that area to be called “dinosaur alley”: a strip of land on the east coast of the United States particularly running between and around Washington DC and Baltimore.
It is called “dinosaur alley” for the sheer level of dinosaur bones and fossils found in the area, many of which were in conjunction with excavation projects, some of which were for the laying of sewers. Bone scientists think that the bones and remains they have found make up less than half the species that could exist there.
And so, until the next sewersaurus is found, we get to revel in the neatness that is dinosaurs and how sewers to remove our poo, help us find their crusty remains.
