The taller allosaurus seems poised to bite into the neck of the smaller, spiked stegosaurus that is guarding her young. We’ll never know the battle’s outcome, but we do know what birthed it.

The fossil bones of the two extinct monsters appear opposite each other, forever prepared to attack and repel, in the middle of the Prehistoric Journey exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Colorado students made the timeless contest possible. Colorado teenagers of the 1930s in Cañon City discovered the stegosaurus. A lone Colorado Springs teenager half a century later found her allosaurus on a western Colorado ranch.

India Wood grew up in a flat-roof stucco house in the Patty Jewett neighborhood of Colorado Springs. Wood’s father, Myron, a World War II hero of the Normandy invasion, would sometimes take her hiking. She remembers at age 5 walking with him alongside the cottonwoods of Horse Creek, a tributary of the Arkansas River with its source south of Calhan. Myron sneaked her onto the Fort Carson U.S. Army base in the 1970s searching the hills for fossils.

Myron’s post-war career as a photographer often took him out of state. Wood’s author mother, Nancy, traveled a lot, too, writing and promoting her books.

Wood entertained herself, usually in the dirt of her “chaotic” backyard, which included an untended vegetable garden and a sandbox.

As Wood got older, her mother sent her to live with friends on Sage Springs Ranch, 150 square miles of leased U.S. Bureau of Land Management property in Moffat County, close to Dinosaur National Monument. The ranch wife, Judy Beard, didn’t want children around; she sent Wood into the field looking for dinosaur fossils, which she had seen for herself but never bothered to dig up.

The ranch husband, Minford, lent her a pickaxe, a screwdriver and a splayed paintbrush for her field adventures.

In 1979, her first summer at Sage Springs, Wood spotted something at an odd angle on a hillside, got on her knees and started digging with the loaned screwdriver and then with an ice pick, eventually freeing an 80-pound bone.

Wood checked out paleontology reference books from the Pikes Peak Library District. Her science teacher at North Junior High School confirmed what the books suggested: Among her finds she had uncovered and brought home an allosaurus – a late Jurassic carnivore, similar in appearance to the tyrannosaurus, that weighed about a ton and feasted on stegosauruses.

Wood nicknamed her dinosaur pieces “Alice.”

When Wood’s pile of bones got too big, her mother asked her to get help from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, then called the Denver Museum of Natural History. Wood dropped off her allosaurus bones along with a note in a Nocona boot box that she left at the museum’s front desk. K. Don Lindsey, the museum’s curator of paleontology, called back. They met at the ranch, and Lindsey’s son Jimmy helped Wood with the excavation.

Once extracted, “Alice” rested in storage for years until the museum put the allosaurus together with its famous stegosaurus, recovered in 1937 by Cañon City High School students with help from the museum.

The Cañon City students found the stegosaurus on a hike up Felch Creek, 10 miles north of Cañon City, led by their natural history teacher, Frederick Kessler.

Kessler gave his students every opportunity to work in the field. When museum personnel came to help with excavation, Kessler asked that the museum hire his students. The museum paid the students 25 cents an hour for their labor.

The task of preparing such a rare find, the most complete stegosaurus specimen of its era, fell to Philip Reinheimer, a former Pittsburgh steelworker whom the museum had hired to fix the coal-fired furnaces. At age 64, Reinheimer proved his worth in working with fossils. He completed the stegosaurus’ assembly, filling in missing parts, in 1939.

The museum later corrected Reinheimer’s work after a team discovered a 70 percent complete stegosaurus near Kessler’s site. The new specimen revealed the proper order of bones, plates and spikes. The museum put the Kessler stegosaurus and Wood allosaurus together in 1995.

Wood worked alone on the ranchland, but now she joins museum teams in annual one-week digs, getting her fingers once again into the dirt and finding “cool stuff” – a duck-billed dinosaur, turtle shells, “pieces of past life.”