Ep. 4- Petrified Forest, Pt. 2: Imagine A Former World

To experience the “forest” of Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, visitors must imagine a lush tropical former world from more than 200 million years ago. In the second of two episodes, we meet the forest’s creatures through the Rainbow Forest Museum’s exhibits and staff (Jessica Barnett and Garrett Stone). Ranger Barnett guides us to the park’s most famous log and its panoramic view. Then Professor Andrew Heckert charts the rise and fall of the park’s fauna over the course of the Triassic Period, which set the stage for the long reign of the dinosaurs.

Podcast chapters (M= minutes, S= seconds) are summarized here: 

00M 00S OPENING: I pick up the park journey with the drive from Blue Mesa to the Rainbow Forest Museum and Giant Logs Trail near the park’s south entrance.

01M 22S A SKULL TAKES SHAPE: Visitor Katie Bell and her children learn from paleontologist Ranger Jessica Barnett, as they help piece together a fossil skull. The skull belonged to a metoposaur, a salamander-like fish-eating amphibian that grew to several feet long.

07M 04S IMMERSED IN A DIORAMA: Intern Garrett Stone tours us through a room with murals and life-sized models of Triassic plants and animals. He contrasts phytosaurs that resemble today’s crocodiles with true crocodilians that stood on two legs. We see a phytosaur’s jaws around the slender neck of the early bipedal dinosaur, Coelophysis.

10M 27S Q&A WITH A RANGER: At a museum display, Ranger Jessica touts the advantageous joint flexibility shared by dinosaurs and their descendants, the birds. I also ask her how scientists determine the age of fossils.

15M 44S GIANT LOGS PANORAMA: Behind the museum on the Giant Logs Loop Trail, Ranger Barnett tells how rounded stream pebbles are evidence of a large enough river to have floated the giant logs.  Atop the hill, we reach the park’s signature log, Old Faithful. Jessica describes the spectacular park panorama that extends to the Long Logs logjam and Agate House.

19M 03S GET READY FOR DINOSAURS: Professor Andrew Heckert discusses the fate of the park’s fauna, adding armored aetosaurs to the list already mentioned. He noted that anyone would have bet on the diverse “crocodile line” of the time. But conditions changed, and through adaptations never seen before, dinosaurs became the rulers of the remainder of the Mesozoic Era,.

29M 51S FOLLOW THE BROWN SIGN: Ranger Jessica Barnett extols the rich rewards of taking a few hours away from a journey along I-40, by following the brown sign directing you to Petrified Forest National Park.

31M 51S NEXT EPISODE, THANKS: I promise Episode 5 and thank participants.