I usually prospect these colorful hills with one of my best friends in science, Tom Williamson, a curator at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque.

So many species, big and small, living together. We find the skull domes that horse-sized omnivores called pachycephalosaurs used to head butt each other, and the jaws that horned and duck-billed dinosaurs sliced up plants with. The New Mexico desert where fossils can be found. rex and the gargantuan limb bones of long-necked sauropods of the Brontosaurus mold, some of which weighed more than a Boeing 737, easily making them the largest animals to ever thunder across the land. We often come across the railroad spike teeth of T. Bones, teeth, shells, and other parts of animals would often get buried in mud or sand and turn to stone, becoming the fossils that provide the only clues that these lost worlds ever existed. These were lush environments, teeming with life during a time when the Earth was much warmer and there were no ice caps on the poles. Most of the candy-striped badlands in this part of New Mexico are carved from rocks laid down in rivers and lakes between about 84 and 56 million years ago. The fewer buildings, roads and houses to cover up the treasure we seek, the better.

I’m a paleontologist, and I visit here at least once a year, to hunt for fossils of dinosaurs and other long-extinct creatures.

Not many people live here, making it feel like a remote backwater within the world’s most industrialized country.

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