On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
frosty
Dinosaur NM: Utah, east of Salt Lake, on the border of Colorado.
Dinosaur NM is the location where in 1909 paleontologist Earl Douglass, of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum, discovered what he called “the best-looking dinosaur prospect I have ever found.”, which turned out to be one of the richest fossil beds on Earth. There are fossils of over 500 dinosaurs with ten species here. Douglass uncovered twenty complete skeletons, now in museums around the country.
The main attraction is the Quarry Exhibit Hall, which shows fossils partially uncovered but still embedded in sandstone. The idea for this kind of exhibit came from Douglass himself. There are also a hiking trails, a reach of the Green River for whitewater kayaking and rafting, and historic sites.
Quarry wall in the exhibit hall. This remaining wall is about 1/4 of the original sandstone that was quarried for fossils.
This picture and the next two are partially excavated fossils in the quarry wall.
Split Mountain. The Green River flows through a canyon behind this mountain. One of the two park campgrounds is in the foreground.
We took a short hike on the Fossil Discovery Trail where you can see a few fossils in the same environment that Douglass found in 1909. This is a femur fossil.
Vertebrae, on the trail. The white arrow was very helpful for seeing this one.
Benw
Dinosaurs kinda blow my mind.
frosty
I must have messed up the caption for the last picture. This is the dinosaur exhibit in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh that we visited a few years ago. Many of the best fossils ended up here. I remember seeing them with my grandparents when I was elementary school age.
Betty
Do they have a theory about why so many fossils are located in that spot? Fascinating place to visit.
HinTN
I was not aware of Dinosaur National Monument. Thanks for the pix and a new place to visit.
I’m with @Betty: on her question, too.
WaterGirl
@frosty: fixed.
cope
@Betty: The explanation that was given last time I was there (30+ years ago) was that their bodies washed down a flooded river and were entombed in a a sand/mud bar.
Thanks for showing us these pics and allowing me to reminisce about what we left behind when we moved to The Mildew State.
frosty
@Betty: There are a few theories. Floods which drowned the dinosaurs and washed the bodies to slackwater where they all sank together is one. A location like a watering hole where many congregated is another. I don’t recall seeing any definitive reason why Dinosaur had so many in one place.
ETA @cope: Thanks!
TheOtherHank
A bit of self promotion for those that want to see some back country views of Dinosaur National Monument. A while ago I did a couple OTRs of a rafting trip down the Green that including floating through Split Mountain:The Green River in Dinosaur National Monument
The Green River in Dinosaur National Monument, part 2
TheronWare
Simply fascinating!
arrieve
Wonderful pictures. In April 2020, I was scheduled to do a trip with Road Scholar working for a week in the Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis, Wyoming, learning how to clean fossils. Obviously it didn’t happen and now it probably won’t. But I’d love to do a trip like this.
J R in WV
@TheOtherHank:
Thanks for those links — not self-promotion at all when so on topic.
Frosty, I’ve visited Dinosaur National Monument twice, was amazing. I specifically recall up on the wall on the upper right side looking at it from the mezzanine level, there was this 6 foot high fossil skull looking right at the visitors. And a big femur mounted on that mezzanine where people could handle it, hug it, be in contact with it — it was shiny and polished by people’s hand contact alone.
And I recall learning that they believed that the fossils were deposited in a stream bed, that they knew this because of the differential deposition of particle sizes on the downstream sides of the large bones. And the large bones are HUGE also too~!!~
We also visited Fossil Butte National Monument in SW Wyoming, the fossils are less amazingly huge, but the variety of species is much wider, from tiny creatures like bats, crayfish and birds to big crocodiles and giant turtles, really big fish, mostly aquatic species living in the lake, more rarely flying species that for one reason or another fell into the lake, sank and were entombed in the sediment.
There are commercial fee quarries in the productive formation in the same general area as the national monument where one can split bedrock searching for fossils. Really rare species are retained and passed to the federal park staff, but common stuff you get to take home.
When we built our house in 1991-94 we were buying lots of home building magazines, and I saw an ad for Ulrich Quarry, a family-owned quarry in the Fossil Butte area that provided fossil-rich cut stone for interior decor.
Our bedroom fireplace is covered with pale gray limestone with a wide variety of fossils, mostly fish, in it. I set the stone tile myself with the aid of a friend I collected rocks with. It is gazing into the mists of deep time to be in the room with it.
dnfree
We visited there with our then-young children in the 1980s. We were all impressed.
@J R in WV: your wall sounds amazing.