Billy Doran is president and founder of the Museum at Dinosaur Junction. He joined guest host Connie Willis (info) to discuss dinosaur findings in the state of Colorado, along with how his passion and adventure for discovering fossils has blossomed into a fun, educational, and interactive non-profit museum and a camp for kids. Doran admitted he became fascinated with dinosaurs, like most children, around age four or five, and that fascination never went away. Though not formally educated in paleontology, Doran has nonetheless had great success finding dinosaur fossils.
"The areas that I tend to be most lucky in are Jurassic layers, that's where you find a lot of the real big dinosaurs," he said. Doran explained how around 100 million years ago the Colorado Rockies had not pushed up yet and the land was under water, which is why ocean plant and turtle fossils as well as shark teeth can be found on mountain tops now. Doran reported finding ancient 230-million-year-old dinosaur footprints and fossils belonging to much more recent 150-thousand-year-old woolly mammoths and giant ground sloths. Some fossilized dinosaur footprints in Colorado are so detailed that you can see wrinkles on the bottoms of the print, he added.
Doran also commented on how ideas of dinosaurs have changed in the last few years, especially the notion of feathered dinosaurs. There is no question many dinosaurs had feathers or something like them, he disclosed. "There's really good thinking that Tyrannosaurus rex had very primitive [feathers], probably more like bristly quills," Doran said.
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Mike Crowe is a myth chaser whose interests include Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, Champ, aliens, UFOs, clowns, monsters, and cryptozoology. In the latter half, he shared his adventures chasing down myths of all types and what it takes to be a myth chaser. Crowe admitted he was different as a child, noting by age three or four, he could identify locations he had been to at only six months old. The first strange thing he remembered witnessing was a ghost at a church.
Crowe described being at a Halloween party at his church at age seven and seeing a girl he did not recognize wearing a patterned flour sack dress from the Depression Era. "Next thing we know, she just floats away," he reported. Crowe revisited the church and its graveyard on Halloween in 2018 and made some amazing findings, including EMFs and lights that could not be explained. A fellow investigator was struck on the back of the head by an invisible force, he noted.
Crowe spoke about the so-called "Little Green Men" seen at the Sutton family farm in Kelly, Kentucky in 1955. According to eyewitness reports, the Suttons witnessed aliens of different kinds floating over their house, and the unexpected ETs were impervious to gunshots. "They were absolutely scared to death," he reported, noting the sheriff did not find anything at the property except for some gun shells and green goo on a fence post. An Army detail may have visited the site to remove items, he suggested. Crow also revealed he was shown the area where the alien craft landed. "There is a large darkened stain in the ground," he said.