“Any one of the amazing stories about my dad, when you scratch the surface a little bit, you get an even more amazing story,” says his daughter, Katie Lockley Weller, citing a time he once sublet his apartment to a terrorist cell of the IRA while attending the University of Belfast.
“That's just kind of who dad was," she tells Westword. "Everything was a really unique, unbelievable story, and he just loved learning and sharing and telling everyone about his experiences.”
In Morrison, Dinosaur Ridge benefited from Lockley’s zest for teaching and sharing with others, as it is now open seven days a week for people to take a tour or self-guide themselves to see incredibly preserved dinosaur tracks. Lockley co-founded Friends of Dinosaur Ridge in 1989.
“There's no place like Dinosaur Ridge anywhere else in the United States, in some ways in the world,” says executive director Jeff Lamontagne. “Dinosaur Ridge is that unique place largely because Dr. Lockley saw it as such and talked about it as such and convinced everyone that that was the case, and we're all the beneficiaries of that.”
Katie jokes that growing up, she sort of thought she owned Dinosaur Ridge since she and her older brother, Peter Lockley, would spend so much time there with their father. Up until his death, Lockley was still brainstorming ideas and trying to wrap up his unfinished work at Dinosaur Ridge and his many other projects.
“He traveled all over the world,” Lamontagne says. “He took hundreds of international trips, almost all of them to identify and interpret dinosaur tracks, but he lived in Golden Gate Canyon, and his service to Dinosaur Ridge never really ended, so I think he saw his globe-trotting dinosaur track expertise as having a home.”
According to Lamontagne, Lockley’s impact on paleontology cannot be understated.
Before he came along, Lamontagne says, people only studied dinosaur bones. Then Lockley convinced everyone to study dinosaur tracks as well — revolutionizing the field.
“His contribution in that regard to say, ‘Let's look at tracks and traces and footprints in addition to bones,’ opened up whole areas of inquiry about evolution that others were blind to,” Lamontagne says. “All of paleontology, natural history and evolution has benefited from Martin's insight in that way.”
Before Lockley was a globetrotter who called Colorado home, his story began in Wales, where he was born. His father, Ronald Lockley, was a renowned ornithologist who famously leased the tiny island of Skokholm and eventually turned it into a nature preserve.
Ronald and Julian Huxley made one of the earliest known professional nature films, The Private Life of the Gannets, in 1934, which won an Oscar. Peter says it’s no surprise that both men left the world having preserved some of it.
“They both had the same passion for what they do,” he says.
Growing up in Wales on an estate that Peter says reminds him of the X-Men academy, Lockley had a horse and a pet seal named Diana. He was also a star shot put athlete, winning the All England Schools championship twice; at one point he was considered an Olympic prospect.
Lockley obtained many degrees over the years, starting with one in geology from Queen’s University Belfast, then a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham before becoming a post-doctoral researcher at Glasgow University, where Peter was born.
In the early 1980s, Lockley moved to the Centennial State to teach at the University of Colorado Denver, where he stayed for thirty years. While there, he also earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and a minor in religious studies.
“I always say he lapped me because I was in college getting my first bachelor's degree while he went and got a second in Spanish language,” Katie remembers.
In addition to English, Lockley was proficient in Spanish, French, German and Korean. He published over 1,000 peer-reviewed papers and seventeen books during his lifetime. In 2020, he became the first non-Korean to receive the Korean Presidential Citation for Contribution to Cultural Heritage Protection, for his work to preserve a dinosaur trackway in South Korea.
Lamontagne joined Lockley in South Korea last summer. He fondly remembers Lockley teaching him the basic Korean characters while they were there.
“He just always either wants to learn or teach,” Lamontagne says.
Lockley also loved to take others along with him, including his children. The pair have memories of summers in Moab and Canada and digs around the world. Katie says they learned from their father to always look for dinosaur tracks while they were out and about, and she recalls him carrying her on his shoulders to see a dinosaur trackway in Portugal for the five-mile trek there and back.
“I think I'd been to twelve different countries by the time I was twelve,” Peter says. “He had a friend in each one — not just an acquaintance or a colleague, but people who invited us into their homes and shared their families with us and things like that. It took me into my young adult years to realize that that wasn't normal. That not everyone had those international, long-distance friendships.”
Martin Lockley (left) had friends all over the world, including David Attenborough (center).
The Lockley Family
“It's just me standing there with my hands on my hip; I was missing my front tooth, looking super proud to be photographed,” Peter says. “They had printed this out life-size and created a mold of that very track, and they had stairs going up so it could be a photo op, where all these Japanese children can come up and stand in the track and pose under the same picture.”
The interactive nature of the exhibit shows Lockley’s dedication to teaching others and making dinosaur track knowledge accessible. "Everyone knows he was passionate about dinosaurs, but really, at his core, he was passionate about teaching, and he just loved enlightening children,” Katie says. “That's really what made Dad happy.”
She remembers how when she asked to watch television as a child, and her father would ask if she would rather draw some examples of amphibians instead, and then he'd sit down to draw with her. Lockley also insisted that his children keep a travel journal everywhere they went, which they came to realize he did himself.
Lamontagne says that after Lockley passed, he heard from a teacher who shared that the dino expert had surprised an elementary school class by showing up to their dinosaur-themed concert, which they had invited him to after learning about him and his studies.
Lockley's children say they look back now and realize how lucky they were that he was so dedicated to being a father as well as a groundbreaking paleontologist. Their parents divorced when they were fairly young, and Martin took a sabbatical to study dinosaur tracks in Grand Junction. Still, he made the journey down to Denver every week to spend time with Peter and Katie.
In addition to his kids, he is survived by his nephew Daniel — to whom Martin became a father figure — as well as Daniel’s two children, his sister and his longtime partner, Gretchen Kloten Minney.
After Martin’s cancer diagnosis earlier in 2023, Katie became his caregiver. She says he used the extra time at home to bond deeply with his grandchildren.
“He was so proud of his grandchildren,” Katie says. “It was not the circumstances we would have hoped for, but we did get the blessing of lots of time with him.”
In spring 2024, Dinosaur Ridge will rename its Discovery Center near the entrance to Red Rocks Amphitheatre the Martin G. Lockley Discovery Center. There will be a rotating display of his field guides, maps and other works in his honor.
“Anything he was passionate about — whether it be family or nature or mentoring or friendships or travel or dinosaurs — it was just kind of like that old adage ‘If you do something you love, you'll never work a day in your life,’” Peter says. “We got to witness that day in and day out. He never came home upset.”
