Effigia Okeeffeae – O’Keeffe’s Ghost

“There are times in my own life when, half deliberately, I take a kind of restless action to uncouple from the familiar in the midst of ordinary life, just in order to see.”

Maxine Greene~

Why do people seek out Ghost Ranch?  Clearly to find the essence of Georgia O’Keeffe, the artist who repeatedly painted the landscapes there from every angle.  To stand in the middle of the Ranch and pivot your consciousness is to experience a natural museum hung with her paintings, edge to edge. She believed in amplifying meanings—the oranges are more orange, the golds more gold, the reds more red. The hills become thighs and shoulders; the ancient trees, sensuous statues.

Yet, there is an even more dramatic reason for finding Ghost Ranch, ten miles west of Abiquiu, Georgia’s finally home. It is the site of the most stunning paleontology discoveries in the Western Hemisphere.  Dinosaurs lived there 210 M years ago and are now yielding their secrets to even the most earnest amateur.  The Hayden Quarry is the site of the recent paleontology class that we visited last week.  For more information, see Science, July 2007, or Dinosaurs Alive! (IMAX movie).

Georgia O’Keeffe had a way of hanging around when the digging got interesting in the past, thus one of the sleek yellow and lime green dinosaurs is dubbed, Effigia Okeeffeae.

Both Cairo Diary and Etruscan Evenings have stunning archeological finds. I am in hot pursuit of more striking discoveries—but will they be dinosaurs or early man? Who knows?

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 10th, 2010 at 5:17 pm and is filed under Education, Fiction, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.