August 2017: Epic Road Trip 2: Part III, Day 2 (cont.): Dinosaur National Monument

Sign for Dinosaur National Monument

Day 2:  Continued.  Dinosaur National Monument
We spent the morning in Vernal, Utah going to museums and such.  Then we headed over to Dinosaur National Monument.  I think the entrance to the park is about seven miles from downtown Vernal.  Dinosaur National Monument is pretty large, and has portions in Utah and Colorado.  On the Utah side are the dinosaurs and some significant petroglyphs.  On the Colorado side are more of the archaeological sites.  I will only focus on the dinosaur fossils on this post and I will devote the fourth post on this trip to the glyphs.

When we got to Dinosaur National Monument, we stopped at the Visitors Center.  This is the critical step if you wish to see the monument.  First, it's where you buy the fridge magnets and hiking staff medallions, and second it's where you catch the bus for the trip up to the wall of dinosaur fossils.  You cannot drive up to the main exhibit.  I think they try to limit how many people are in the exhibit at any one time.  It makes for a more enjoyable experience I think.

During the Jurassic period, 150 million years ago, there was a river that ran through this area.  Was it the Green River?  Dunno.  Probably not.  That was a long time ago.  This area is part of a greater fossil area called the Morrison Formation.  It spread over Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.  Some of the greatest fossils in history have been quarried from the Morrison Formation.  The Jurassic fossils in these three states come from the Morrison Formation.  The Eocene fish and mammal fossils that literally come from the same location are part of the more recent Green River Formation.

The river that rushed through this area had a bend in it.  The river must have been fairly deep at this location.  For some reason, animals died quite frequently at a location upstream of the river and fell into the water.  I don't know why they died.  Maybe it was all at once, maybe it was over a million years.  I don't know.  What I do know is that the dinosaurs fell in the river and were washed downstream to the bend.  They were trapped in the eddies of the river and sank to the bottom where they were entombed in the clay and silt.  There is very little evidence of predation on any of the fossils, so it appears they were underwater almost as soon as they died.  Where they were in the river, and as deep as they were, there was little oxygen so the bones did not deteriorate and were preserved.

The river changed course as rivers do, and the animals entombed were forgotten.  the clay and silt hardened into rock and over the millenia the bones also silicified and turned to rock.  During a period of mountain building, during the Laramide orogeny, the ancient, now hardened river bottom was uplifted and tilted to a 67 degree angle.  Erosion followed and in 1909 the fossil beds were discovered by scientists.  From 1909 to 1915, paleontologists took hundreds of complete and near complete skeletons from this site.  Many museums in the world have complete stegosauruses and alosauruses from this quarry.  Scientists learned a great deal about what we know about dinosaurs from the specimens at this quarry.  Diplodocuses were taken from here as well.  This must have been a very large bend in a very large, deep river.  I'm thinking it might have been the size of the Columbia River or even the Mighty Mississippi.  Whatever it was, it was big.

The paleontologists got tired of digging up bones at the site, and also decided they had learned everything they could learn about the species that were present with all the fossils that had already been dug and one of them suggested exposing a bone layer and leaving it as a park for the American people.  In 1915, Woodrow Wilson dedicated 80 acres as Dinosaur National Monument.  Over the years, the park has grown to over 200,000 acres and spans into Colorado.  I read that there are over 800 paleontological sites within the monument.  I don't know if any of them are actively being dug or studied.  The park also encompasses some world class scenery that resembles the Grand Canyon in places.  There are also many petroglyph sites within the park dating back to the Fremont Indian days which is in pre-history.  The local tribes didn't even know who the people were that made the glyphs.

I haven't been able to find much anywhere about the actual size of the wall of bones in the Quarry Exhibit Hall, other than it covers 5000 square feet.  That is roughly the size of my upstairs and downstairs square footage in my house set end to end, twice.  There are over 1500 bones exposed in the wall.  When the paleontologists found a bone, they exposed the entire profile of the bone but didn't remove it, rather they left it in situ.  That's a fancy way of saying they left it in place.  There is an upper deck and a lower deck at the monument, so you can see the bones from two different vantage points.

On the opposite side of the exhibit hall, there are other fossils and casts of fossils.  One of the casts had a sign on it that said, please don't touch this replica, it's fragile, instead, wouldn't you rather touch a real dinosaur bone? and had an arrow to a spot on the wall that you can actually touch dinosaur bones.  It was pretty incredible.  Another thing that was incredible was the fact that there were so many big dinosaur bones taken from the site that they made furniture from some of them that you can still sit on.  I have pictures.  They weren't comfortable, but it was pretty cool that you can sit on a 150 million year old dinosaur bone.  We ended up staying there much longer than we anticipated because it was just that cool.  I've said it on this blog before, America is the land of superlatives.  Leave it at that.

Let's look at pictures.

The road to the visitors center.  The weather got a little rainy later

This is rugged terrain 

Apparently fiberglass dinosaurs are a thing in Utah

Inside the visitors center, a bone encased in plaster and placed on a sledge.  This is how they used to do it.

They have so many bones they don't know what to do with them all.  Inside the visitors center

This is inside the quarry exhibit.  Just a jumble of bones.  I wouldn't want to sort these either.  There could be a dozen individuals represented in this photo.  The river rendered their bodies and deposited them in pieces.  Some dinosaurs were deposited mostly intact.  Those are the ones that were excavated and sent to museums around the world.  Others were like this and left in place for us to enjoy.

5000 square feet of this.  We stayed for a very long time, looking at this and everything.  I want to go back

backbones

literally everywhere

I think they said this was a diplodocus tail section

Skull of a sauropod.  Sounds like a great name for a punk band

Pelvis of a dinosaur.  When paleontologists started paying attention to pelvises, they came to realize that dinosaurs and birds were closely related.

A jumbled mess.  A very cool jumbled mess

Could somebody give me a hand?

I am only posting a fraction of pictures I took here

I imagine it probably didn't smell too good when this all was rotting

Backs and tails

Wherever they found a bone they left it.

Diplodocus vertebrae 

The square footage of my house, twice in dinosaur bones

Literally everywhere

The Hot Chick in front of a fragile cast of a dinosaur.

Cast of an allosaurus skull

another cast

Looks like an alien's tail, you know from the movie?

contemplation

Sitting on a dinosaur's legbone

There is so much here that I'm running out of snarky things to say about them

Just when you think you've seen them all...

Touch a real dinosaur bone!

This was another one you could touch.

This one too

I see growth plates on the two up top

Go ahead and touch this bone too

They put plaster bandages on this one to make it look like they were still excavating it.  That way you could see part of the process.

We were amazed at the abundance of bones.  Everywhere

The pile of bodies must have been incredible

Stuff like this would have been cool in literally any other museum in the world.  Here, though this cast of an allosaurus was kind of ho-hum when you could turn around and touch actual dinosaur bones!

Some dinobits.  Sounds like a cereal

Stegosaurus spike and plate, and I think that is an ankylosaurus tail club

I was overwhelmed and stepped outside in the rain for a few minutes.  This is what the landscape was like near the center

More landscape.  There's dinosaurs in them thar hills

More landscapey stuff

This was a pretty cool place

My grandsons sitting on a bone

Look at me, I'm touching a dinosaur bone!  Didn't get arrested!

I will go back to Dinosaur National Monument someday.  It was one of the most amazing places I have ever been.  We all enjoyed it.  I hope to go back someday when I can explore more of the park.

Epic Road Trip 2:  Part I

Epic Road Trip 2:  Part II

Epic Road Trip 2:  Part IV