Denver, CO
Dinosaur footprints, fossils discovered “in our own backyard” in Broomfield
BROOMFIELD — Past fields of yellow wildflowers, tall grass and prairie dog burrows, an Adams County geology teacher, four of his students and the Broomfield mayor huddled around the fossilized footprint of a horned dinosaur that roamed this land some 70 million years ago.
“To have this in our own backyard,” Mayor Guyleen Castriotta said. “You can’t beat it.”
The Friday afternoon field trip was the result of Northglenn High School geology teacher Kent Hups stumbling across dinosaur fossils about three years ago while out scouting.
Hups is a researcher with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science who has excavated fossils throughout the West for decades. During the height of the pandemic, he stayed closer to home and took his high school geology students on virtual walks around his community hunting for natural treasures he could share with them over Zoom.
That’s when he first found dinosaur fossils on Broomfield open space, adjacent to a suburban neighborhood. To help preserve the area, Hups doesn’t want to disclose the exact location.
“I’m excited as hell,” Hups said. “You do a lot of whooping and hollering by yourself when you find these things. When you find footprints, you’re looking at something that was left by a living animal. To be able to touch that — it’s like 70 million years ago, this thing was alive and stepped right here. I’m stepping in the same place. It’s an amazing feeling.”
Traversing through thick grasses and shimmying up and down steep hills, Hups led the class to three dinosaur footprints, but said there were surely more in the area. The fossilized footprints looked like garden stepping stones jutting up from the grass, a little larger than a basketball with ridges and indentations that Hups explained were the dinosaurs’ toes.
Based on the toe patterns, Hups said it was a horned dinosaur — possibly a Triceratops.
It took a while working with the city of Broomfield to get the proper permits, but on Friday, Hups was finally able to take some students to investigate the area. He handed out plastic bags to the teens — some who had trekked out in Doc Marten boots and Converse sneakers — and showed them how to crouch low to inspect the dirt for bones.
Alanna Santa Cruz, 15, whipped a magnifying glass out of her back pocket as she squatted on the ground, her knees touching the earth through the ripped holes in her jeans.
Alanna is in Hups’ school paleontology club.
“When I was a kid, I was obsessed with dinosaurs,” she said. “I knew all about them and had a bunch of the toys and watched all the movies. I wanted to see what it would be like to be a paleontologist.”
The area they visited Friday was ripe with small fossils and bones sticking out of the ground among rocks, cacti and dirt. Some were more obvious to the untrained eye — shaped like vertebrae, for example — while others could be confused for stones and debris. The pieces of creatures were small enough to fit in the palm of a hand and scattered everywhere, broken into bits after years of exposure.
Students approached Hups with cupped palms full of objects. Sometimes Hups told them they had just found a mineral, but other times, his eyes lit up as he announced they had found bone.
“If you’re not sure, lick it,” Hups said, bringing an object from the ground to his lips and grazing it with his tongue. “If it sticks to it like ice, that’s a fossil.”
Hups’ students looked at their teacher with disgusted grimaces.
“Try it!” he said with delight.
“No, thanks, mister,” Alanna said.
When Hups turned his back, Alanna marveled at an object in her hand, turning it over and over trying to determine its value. She brought it to her mouth and snuck a quick lick.
“You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” she said, declaring it a fossil and popping it into her bag.
The class wrote down the GPS coordinates of their finds so they can bring them back later in the year after they’re done investigating them, so as not to disturb the natural resources, Hups said.
Jonah Rotert, 17, was quiet and reserved at the start of the trek, but he couldn’t help but grin as his bag filled with tiny bones belonging to prehistoric creatures. Hups said he was sure Rotert had found a crocodile bone.
“It’s a really cool feeling,” Rotert said. “I’m the first person to touch these in millions of years.”
Millions of years ago, these massive creatures walked where the class stood, Hups said, pointing toward cars speeding down U.S. 287 in the distance.
“I love seeing the modern on top of ancient life,” Hups said.
Next school year, the students will present their findings to the city of Broomfield and come up with ideas on how to educate the public about the land, the fossils and how important it is to report findings, Hups said.
“What did this environment look like all these years ago?” Hups said. “Until we find fossils, we don’t know. What’s most important about them is the story they tell.”
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It was a youth league play. Only the youth leaguer sitting next to me would never have done it.
“That’s illegal,” Easton English said. The 8-year-old from Parker then rose higher in his seat in Section 126 at Coors Field. “That is Illegal!”
Sure is. When you’re on the express train to 100-plus losses, you’re going to come up with creative ways to lose over 162 games. The Rockies managed to find a new one on Saturday against the big, bad Yankees.
The Local Nine gave up a 10-spot in the top of the fifth that featured three walks, seven hits, 14 batters and a viral moment from second baseman Adael Amador.
As Yankees first baseman Paul Goldschmidt looped a single over the infield and into short right, the sublime gave way to ridiculous. At game speed, Amador appeared to lose his glove in midair as the ball went whizzing over his head. Only on replay, it didn’t look as much “lose his glove” as “fling his glove at the ball during mid-flight.”
“I haven’t talked to him about that,” Rockies interim manager Warren Schaeffer said after Colorado was smushed, 13-1, dropping to 9-43 in a season that’s still got 110 games left. “I’m not quite sure what that was. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”
Actually, young Easton already did. MLB rule 5.06 (4) (C) awards the batter and runner three bases if the fielder is adjudged to have deliberately thrown his glove at a live batted ball and said glove touches that ball. There’s no penalty if the ball is not touched or the removal is perceived to have been accidental. Amador told The Post’s Corey Masisak, through an interpreter, that the glove accidentally slipped. The umpiring crew agreed.
Amador stayed in the game. Goldschmidt’s single made it 9-1 Yankees. The Bronx Bombers plated two more after that to put the game away, so the airborne glove became a moot point.
But back in Section 126, where Easton was watching the game with his family, it became another Rockies learning experience. Another perfect example of what not to do.
Easton, you see, is a center fielder with the Parker Knights 8-and-under baseball team. His father, Kevin English, is one of the Knights’ assistant coaches.
“You ever see a flying glove in Parker?” I asked Kevin.
“Never seen it,” he replied.
“You ever teach a flying glove in Parker?” I asked.
“Never would teach that,” he countered. “Don’t think it would ever come up beyond t-ball.”
English brought the crew to 20th & Bleak because it was a rare Saturday matinee and because Yankees slugger Aaron Judge was in town. He expected some jaw-dropping moments. He didn’t count on a teaching one.
“I mean, that was like 8U ball, that one,” Kevin said. “That many runs (in an inning)? That’s what youth baseball is all about.”
Come for the party deck, stay for the life lessons. The Rockies are 2-10 since firing manager Bud Black, and Colorado finishes May with the Cubs and Mets on the road.
“Everybody knows it’s not Bud’s fault,” Kevin said. “That’s a good baseball guy right there.”
Kevin knows good baseball guys. In the English family, the pastime is more than a legacy deal — it runs in the blood. Kevin’s dad, Randy, was a pitcher at Oklahoma State in the late ’70s. As a Poke, his position coach was Tom Holliday — father of Rockies legend Matt Holliday and grandpa of next-gen baseball standouts Jackson and Ethan.
“Every now and then, (my dad messages me), ‘Hey, the Rockies, they just (stink), don’t they?’” Kevin chuckled. “I’m like, ‘Yeah.’”
Yet English wants to watch the games with his son, the way his dad watched games with him. Even if it means forking over $89.99 to the team directly for streaming access, or $19.99 per month.
“I like bringing my son out because I’m trying to teach him young,” Kevin continued. “It’s a game of failure, right? … You’re going to fail more than you succeed. ‘Watch them do the little things. Watch them hustle. Watch them just do little things over and over before the play.’”
Watch them chuck a glove at a single while it’s in the air!
“It’s kind of funny, because my son never really showed a ton of interest in baseball (before this year),” said Kevin, who, yes, named his Easton after the iconic baseball equipment company.
“I never made him play. I’m not going to be like that. But this year, kind of his first year at it, we’re going pretty good.”
In fact, Dad says, their Knights had more wins (12) than the Rockies (nine) as of Saturday night. Must be the coaching.
“Are you rooting for the Rockies or Yankees?” I asked Easton.
“Yankees.”
“How come?”
“Aaron Judge.”
“What advice would you give Rockies players right now?”
“They should pretend it’s a scrimmage and have fun. Don’t worry if people are on base. Just do what you do.”
Please don’t.
“You know, (Easton) asked me, ‘Are the Rockies any good?’ It’s like, ‘They’re not that good, no. But, you know, they have been good. They have been to a World Series. Rocktober, that was fun.’
“But you just tell them, like, ‘Hey, you’re going to be on teams that aren’t always the best, right? They’re not always good, but your attitude and effort is what you can control when you go out there and you play hard, right?’ So, yeah. You know, (the Rockies) are not going to be bad forever.”
He chuckled again.
“At least, you hope not.”
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Originally Published:
A metro Denver man kidnapped four women at gunpoint and sexually assaulted them after he found them on hookup websites, according to an arrest affidavit.
Glen Orion Meridith, 36, was arrested May 13 on suspicion of eight counts of sexual assault, three counts of kidnapping and menacing and one count of assault related to drugging a victim.
Aurora and Denver police identified Meridith while investigating four assaults across the two cities in December, January, February and March, detectives wrote in the affidavit.
The assaults followed a similar pattern — Meridith would meet the women, some of whom were escorts, through websites or apps for personal ads, including the site “Mega Personals.”
He would then pick up the victims in his red Jeep and, in some cases, give them money before he pulled out a gun and pressed it to their necks or temples. He threatened them and forced them into the back seat, where the doors were locked with child locks, then took their phones and sexually assaulted them multiple times.
Meridith would sometimes snort or smoke cocaine and drink during the assaults and record them on his phone, investigators said. He forced one of the women to take cocaine during an assault.
Several of the women reported choking, struggling to breathe and vomiting during the assaults, police wrote.
With two victims, he accused them of being responsible for him being robbed after previous “hookups,” but the women told police they had never met Meridith before. In one incident, Meridith kept the victim in his car for 13 hours after the assault as he drove around Denver before she was able to escape, investigators said.
After the other assaults, Meridith would drive to a different location and threaten to kill the women if they didn’t leave immediately.
Investigators believe there may be other victims in the case, and anyone with information can contact the Denver Police Sex Crimes Unit at 720-913-6040.
Meridith is in custody at the Denver County Jail on a $1 million bond. He’s set to appear in court on June 12.
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Denver, CO
Denver sues Trump administration over threat to withhold $600 million in transportation funding
Denver this week sued the Trump administration over its threat to withhold as much as $600 million in federal transportation funding if the city refuses to align its politics with the president’s stances on issues of immigration and diversity.
Denver joined nearly three dozen other cities and counties in the 105-page lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.
The cities and counties take issue with U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s April memo that warned local jurisdictions they could lose access to federal transportation funding if they do not comply with the Trump administration’s positions on both immigration enforcement and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
Any program or policy “designed to achieve so-called ‘diversity, equity and inclusion,’ or ‘DEI,’ goals, presumptively violates federal law,” Duffy warned in the memo. Localities receiving federal funds must also fully cooperate with federal immigration enforcement or risk losing the money, he wrote.
The cities and counties that sued argue the new federal conditions on awarding the funding are unconstitutional and that the Trump administration does not have the authority to set conditions beyond what Congress has established.
“The Trump administration is willfully breaking the law and, in ignoring the separation of powers between Congress and the White House, violating the bedrock constitutional foundation on which our country was built,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said in a statement Friday.
Denver’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure is the recipient of about $300 million in federal funding, while Denver International Airport received about $310 million between the 2022 and 2024 fiscal years, according to the mayor’s office.
The airport is expected to be eligible for an additional $267 million in grants from 2025 to 2028, a city spokesman said in a news release.
Across the almost three dozen cities and counties that are suing — including San Francisco, New York, Boston, Seattle, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh and Nashville, Tennessee — almost $4 billion in awarded or soon-to-be awarded federal funding is at risk, the lawsuit alleges.
“Allowing the unlawful grant conditions to stand would negatively impact Plaintiffs’ committed budgets, force reductions in their workforce, and undermine their ability to determine for themselves how to meet their communities’ unique needs,” the lawsuit says.
The effort is Denver’s second lawsuit this month against the Trump administration. The city last week joined a lawsuit with Chicago after the Federal Emergency Management Agency refused to pay Denver $24 million in previously awarded grant money.
Additionally, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Denver and Colorado earlier in May over state and local laws that limit how much local police can cooperate with federal immigration officials.
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Originally Published:
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