EMILY SZESZYCKI
September 12, 2004; Page a1

The Girl Scouts of Little Cloud Council had a brontosaurus of a job to do Saturday.

More than 1,000 scouts, troop leaders and parents joined a mock "dinosaur dig" out at Camp Little Cloud Saturday.

John Ribbing, of the Michigan-based Dinosaur Recovery Bureau, led the girls and adults on the archeological adventure, which featured an eight-foot juvenile Maiasaura skeleton.

Under the bright sun and Indian Summer heat, girls giggled and squealed as they unearthed realistic-looking replica bones buried throughout the 143-acre park.

"They're just 'copied' bones," 9-year-old Lacey Walsh informed her troop members, No. 177 from Audubon Elementary School in Dubuque.

Most girls in the troop pulled out bones roughly the size of rulers.

Holly Mills found a spine as she was digging through the dirt.

"Sometimes we thought the sticks in the ground were bones," she said after the dig. "This is really the coolest place."

The event was deemed a success, said Kimberly Feltes, communication coordinator for Girl Scouts of the Little Cloud Council.

"We've had a really good response from all," she said. "It's a pretty remarkable event."

Alliant Energy provided some of the funding for the mock dig. United Way Services of Dubuque and the Delaware County United Way also lent its support.

Feltes said the council holds a similar celebration annually, but have never drawn a crowd as large as Saturday's.

"We like to keep on the cutting edge of what girls like," she said. "We want to let girls know that they can do anything boys can do. This is a perfect platform to see if they're interested in paleontology."

In addition to the dig, the event also featured a variety of "ancient" activity stations, where participants learned about pre-historic bugs, painted their own fossils, played dinosaur games, constructed dinosaur skeletons out of chicken bones and took "primitive" hikes around the camp.

Kara George and Samantha Link, both of Troop 177, were excited to make their own prehistoric "Beanie Baby," complete with popcorn kernels instead of rice on the inside.

Although smiling while creating their arts and crafts, both girls agreed their favorite activity was the archeological adventure.

"There were a lot of small pieces, so we had to be careful," George said. "We learned that the bones were stiff on the inside."

"I just like digging and I've never touched dinosaur bones before," Link said.

Cutline: Melita Gress (left), 10, and Hanna Conley, 10, both of Monona, Iowa, uncover the replica of a dinosaur skull during a mock archeological dig Saturday morning at Camp Little Cloud.

Ben Plank