2006 Slide Show, Photo 7

Here's one to startle you. Edwards Island, Isle Royale, at the northeast end of Tobin Harbor, and over the ridge comes a pair of dangerous velociraptors. Yes, this is a bit of digital chicanery, done to one of my own photos by my 14-year-old son Logan, who can be found in other annual Isle Royale slide shows. Log' has been working with Photoshop Elelments lately, and he's made a few Isle Royale dino shots. There was no island in this location, science has decided, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs ruled. Still, the ridges that form the island today did exist back then, having been created hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs inhabited the Earth. Those ridges came into being when the vast solidified lava lakes of the Great Midcontinent Rift (which occured about 1 billion years ago and was located, in part, where Lake Superior now lies) became so heavy that the crust of the Earth sank into the mantle and the ends of those dozens of layers of cooled lava bent upward. Those massive, miles-upon-miles-wide, broken, bent-up slabs of the Earth's crust formed the ridges of the Keweenaw Peninusla to the southeast and of Isle Royale to the northwest, as though they were the rims of a bowl. Dinosaurs lived in areas not so distantly west of the Lake Superior region, and at the same latutude. I have never read, however, whether dinorsaurs once hiked the ridges that would become the bones of Isle Royale tens of millions of years later. It was a mere 10,000 years or so ago that the last great Ice Age created the glaciers that formed Lake Superior and the island, which was made a national park of the United States in 1940.