Ghost Ranch



Ghost Ranch is a 21,000-acre (85 km2) retreat and education center run by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), located close to the village of Abiquiu in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico.



The last private owner of the Ghost Ranch was Arthur Newton Pack, who donated the ranch to the Presbyterian Church. Arthur Pack was also the publisher of Nature magazine and opened the Ghost Ranch Lodge in Tucson, Arizona, and contributed to the creation of the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum.

Ghost Ranch includes a famous paleontological site preserving Triassic dinosaurs. Fossil bones were found here as early as 1885. In 1947 the paleontologist Edwin H. Colbert documented the discovery of over a thousand well-preserved fossilized skeletons of a small Triassic dinosaur called Coelophysis in a quarry here. In 2007, fossil remains of Dromomeron romeri, one of the archaic group of animals called "basal dinosauromorphs," were found in the Hayden Quarry.