In 1881 David Baldwin discovered small fossilized bones on what is now Ghost Ranch and mailed them to paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope in Philadelphia, who had passed through the area in the late 1870s and urged Baldwin to explore and collect. In 1889 Cope named the little dinosaur Coelophysis bauri after Georg Baur, a German morphologist, and the name Coelophysis means “hollow form,” referring to the lightly constructed bones. In June 1947, a field crew led by Edwin H. Colbert of the American Museum of Natural History stopped at Ghost Ranch on the way to Petrified Forest National Monument in Arizona, found fossil fragments they recognized as Coelophysis, and while digging for a partial skeleton instead uncovered a dense bone bed containing hundreds of preserved skeletons. Because the skeletons overlapped, the fossils had to be excavated in large blocks of rock, and 13 blocks were encased in plaster field jackets, each containing numerous whole and partial skeletons. In 1981 and 1982, field crews from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and other institutions collected 15 large blocks from the quarry, and in 1983 another large block was excavated by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History. The last block was excavated in 1985 and is on display at the Ruth Hall Museum at Ghost Ranch. In 1976 the quarry was designated a National Natural Landmark by the National Park Service, in 1981 Coelophysis was named the New Mexico State Fossil, and in 1998 a Coelophysis skull quarried at Ghost Ranch traveled into space aboard NASA's Endeavor Space Shuttle, leaving Earth on January 22 and returning on January 31.