Dino-mite!

A local resident of Vernal, Utah's Dinosaurland

On a tourist brochure for northeastern Utah, a cartoon figure of a tourist begins her walking tour wearing nothing but a flowery hat and a grin. Oh, it's not what you think. It's better. This tourist is a dinosaur.

Northeastern Utah bills itself as Dinosaurland and no wonder. Dinosaur National Monument is located here, spanning an area so wide it includes part of Colorado. Near the monument is the excellent Utah Field House of Natural History State Park and Museum. Located in the town of Vernal, the museum adjoins the epic Dinosaur Garden, where dinosaurs (their lifesize replicas, anyway) still roam the earth. Footprints from dinosaurs walked the earth are still well-preserved north of Vernal at Red Fleet State Park.

But it's not just northeastern Utah that's rich in dinosaur tracks and traces. Central Utah's Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry is another rich site of fossils, while the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum in nearby Price pieces the puzzling bones together. Near Moab in southeastern Utah, the Mill Canyon museum offers dinosaur bones in the rough rock. Also near Moab are the Sauropod Dinosaur Tracksite and the Potash Scenic Byway dinosaur tracks.

Dinosaur National Monument:The Adventure Begins

"We have noticed that a lot of people assume that the main experience at Dinosaur National Monument is to see the dinosaur bones at the Dinosaur Quarry. That makes sense given the park's name. Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth." Uh oh. Is the National Park Service trying to downplay dinosaurs on the official website?

True enough, there's more to Dinosaur than, well, dinosaurs. But if you have a jones for bones like I do, this is the place! The Visitor Centre doubles as a dinosaur quarry. A tall pink (yup, pink) structure of glass and steel stretches to cover an exposed hillside, where the soil has been carefully scraped away to reveal hundreds of huge, strange bones. I see thighbones, a long section of neck or tailbones, skulls with eyeless sockets, a massive rib. A pointed fossils turns out to be a stegosaurus plate. It's the graveyard of the ancient dead.

Putting the bones together is like trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle without any idea of what the picture is. Add to that the quantity and variety of species at this site, and you have the Ultimate Puzzle. But why here? What was it about this place?

"145 million years ago, this part of Utah was an African savannah," says the park ranger. And the site was a sandbar across a river. Dinosaur carcasses floated downstream and collected here, then were buried by layers and layers of soil turned rock. A mere century ago, erosion of the rock revealed its enigmatic secret.

	Close-up of dinosaur bones at the Quarry Visitor Centre. Can't make them out? Try the next one...
A replica of a near-complete skeleton excavated at Dinosaur and whisked off to a Pittsburgh museum. No fair, Carnegie!
	The Green River flows down the canyon at Dinosaur's Rainbow Park

Most bones at Dinosaur are from plant-eating dinosaurs, some as long as 85 feet, some as heavy as 30 tons. A few are from the meat-eating allosaurus, the predator of this Jurassic park.

Utah Field House of Natural History State Park and Museum: Comes With Matching Dinosaur Garden

It might have the longest name of all parks in Utah, but this one is not short on delight. While the Field House doesn't have the big bone collection of Dinosaur National Monument, it has lifesize replicas! Outside the museum in the garden roam replicant reptiles including the horned triceratops, graceful-necked diplodocus and the ever-popular tyrannosaurus rex, its sharp pointy teeth prominently posed. Eek! Prepare to be digested!

Inside, the goodly-sized museum has exhibit after exhibit on geology, local history, prehistoric Indian culture, modern-day wildlife and of course, dinosaurs.

Part museum, part dino garden, part educational, part entertainment, Utah Field Museum has something for everyone. Besides, where else can you tango with t. rex?

Clash of the titans: in the right-hand corner, Corin the dog. In the left-hand corner, those reptiles that predated the dinosaurs. You know, the ones whose names I didn't scribble down. Those ones.	T. rex the star	Rex gets all bashful when you take his photo
Stegosaurus	Triceratops and some mammals

Red Fleet State Park: Dinosaur Tracksite

You've seen the bones. You've shrieked at the replicas. Now you can track dinosaurs.

A 2.4-mile roundtrip hiking trail leads from the small parking spot off the side of the road on the north entrance to Red Fleet. Up and down the gorgeous red Navajo sandstone we go. The extremely well-signed trail leads through juniper and sagebrush before reaching the shore of Red Fleet reservoir. On the rocky red sandstone face jutting out from the water are dozens and dozens of dinosaur footprints.

Dino tracks make more than a fleeting impression

Sometimes there's just a lone footprint. Sometimes there are six, seven in a row. Three-toed and BIG, bigger and deeper and therefore heavier than any other three-toed animal roaming on land today, I almost want to call them alien. But long ago, they called this place home.

The dinosaur that made these tracks is a little-known species, the dilophosaurus. Today they'd be superstars. They walked on two legs, were 8 feet tall and thought to be scavengers. 100 millions years ago, they flocked here in small herds for water. Just like the boaters trying their luck fishing in the reservoir.

College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum: Admission Three Bucks, Price Beyond Compare

Greeting visitors to the CEU museum

"You've got to go to the CEU Museum in Price," says the ranger at the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry. "They've got the best displays around here." He's right.

Next to City Hall on Main Street, Price, Utah stands an imposing grey-white block of a building. Windowless so you would never guess at the insides if you were driving by. Go round the other side and you'll find a statue of one dinosaur attacking another.

Inside, the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum has a fantastic collection. In fact, its dinosaur exhibits are better than the Smithsonian Natural History Museum that I visited in Washington, D.C.! Walk through the glass doors from the lobby to the hall and a meat-eating allosaurus skeleton crouches threateningly over you, one of its hind feet planted possessively on a huge thigh bone. Next to the allosaurus writhes a camarasaurus skeleton.

Not surprisingly, the museum has prominent displays on nearby Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, where lots of allosaurus bones have been excavated. In fact, more meat-eater fossils are discovered compared to plant-eaters.

Scientists think that may be because the quarry, now a dry, dusty place, was once a boggy area where a plant-eating dinosaur would get trapped. Its distress would attract meat-eating dinosaurs on the prowl for quick and easy prey. Too bad the meat-eaters would get themselves trapped in the bog.

Another theory why more meat-eater fossils are found is because there were more meat-eaters. But what about the food pyramid? you say. Don't there need to be more plant-eaters in nature so meat-eaters may live? Maybe meat-eaters ate other meat-eaters, say scientists who advocate this theory. Flexible, those dine-a-saurs.

	Allosaurus skeleton
Another view of Al
	Camasaurus lying down on the job
Mammoth display

On the second floor is the skeleton of a Utahraptor poised to run. No doubt it's running to something instead of running away. The museum's strangely patriotic over the Utahraptor (no guesses as to in which state this meat-eater species was discovered). They're bummed that Steven Spielberg made the star of Jurassic Park the velociraptor (what, you thought I was going to say Jeff Goldblum?). After all, the Utahraptor was fast, travelled in groups, had a wicked sharp claw for slashing the throat of its prey, and a big brain. That last quality is what disqualifies it from a career in Hollywood.

"Are you still working on that?" So I hurry from the kids' discovery corner, where I've been scrunched over the sandbox. No ordinary sandbox, this. Take up one of a half-dozen dry paintbrushes to brush away the play sand and discover a dinosaur skeleton's head grinning back at you. Why do you want to know how old I am?

Other exhibits include the local natural history, Indian culture and an art gallery where local painters and sculptors have fashioned their works after those of prehistoric rock art in the area, including nearby Nine Mile Canyon.

Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry: Dino Bones

On our first day in southeastern Utah, we make a beeline for the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry,an excavation site that's generated thousands of dinosaur fossils in ancient river-bank-turned-solid-rock.

After a bumpy ride on the dirt road through bone grey desert and some surprising patches of water-loving cattails in riverbeds, we arrive at the CLDQ's small museum, which nicely displays a few of the quarry's 12,000 dinosaur fossils. Behind the museum is the quarry itself, covered by two fairly small pink sheds that protect the fossils in the ground from the elements. You can walk into one of the sheds and look at approximately 30 fossils that have been left on-site, including a carnivorous allosaurus jawbone and the big hipbones from a plant-eating camarasaurus.

This publicly-accessible quarry is the very site where the dinosaur fossils are excavated.	A dinosaur fossil left in stone has to be protected from vandals, sadly, and from much of our view.	Our man Corin focuses his laser stare on a potentially paranormal tree in the eerie desert surrounding the Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry.

In addition to the short stroll to the dinosaur quarry, there's a 1.5-mile loop hiking trail across the desert. Unfortunately we don't discover any new dinosaur fossils on the first half-mile of the loop trail and return to the car. After all, if you don't succeed at first, give up!

The storm that came out of nowhere.

On the road leaving the CLDQ, we watch several storms close in on us us, gauzy vertical strands of dark grey, lightning forks flashing within them. Why oh why were we too cheap to splurge on a canopy for our pick-up? We cram our luggage into the extended cab but keep room for the dog.

At nearby Price, a still-thriving pioneer town, the biggest storm unleashes hard rain and darkness. The women cooking at the excellent "Greek Streak" restaurant are ecstatic about the rain.

From Price on Highway 6 to its intersection with Interstate 70, we're chased by the massive storm. We finally outrun it as the highway cuts through an open, parched valley where only a few wisps of grass live. Near the intersection with I-70, massive cliffs of sandstone layers rise tall. The storm is still chasing us and we've new vistas to conquer.

Sauropod Dinosaur Tracksite: Ancient Footprints

Our next stop is the Sauropod Dinosaur Tracksite, where a familiar scene--as seen on the Discovery Channel--is thought to have been enacted by very different players.

Several massive dinosaur footprints embedded in the rock, thought to be those of a plant-eating camarasaurus, take a 90-degree turn to the right. Why? The camarasaurus prints, huge with three distinct clawed toes, are accompanied by more tracks--smaller and thought to belong to several predators.

Did the plant-eating dinosaur ever get away? Is the evidence of its life (or death) swallowed up in the pale red rocks, still waiting to be discovered? What did the first people to come across these massive tracks think? Did this discovery mark the first usage of the world-famous expression "D'oh!"?

	Our man Corin surveys a dinosaur footprint at the Sauropod Dinosaur Tracksite.
On hands (and knees) in the presence of the ancient.
	Thumb up for the Sauropod Tracksite's other major attraction!

We don't end up staying long at the Sauropod Dinosaur Tracksite. The storm we outran on the highway from Price is about to catch up with us. The beginnings of a dust storm lightly coat our skin and teeth. Worried about bogging the truck down in wet mud, we scramble out of there.

Mill Canyon Dinosaur Trailhead: Dino Bones

Also accessible from Highway 191 is the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Trailhead, an outdoor museum where the numbered exhibits are still embedded in the rock.

There are a dozen numbered stakes making the location of dinosaur bones at Mill Canyon. Some of the fossils--purple/dark-grey in colour--are distinguishable as femurs or verterbrae, but we would have simply breezed by most of them as flecks in the rock. Seeing the fossils locked in the grey rock makes me appreciate what a Herculean task it is to be a paleontologist--peeling rock away from fossils, armed only with a soft broom.

While dinosaur bones are scattered in the Mill Canyon rock, there are no dinosaur tracks. However, some great tracks can be found nearby.

Potash Scenic Byway: Dino Tracks

Just off the Potash Scenic Byway, also known as Highway 279, are some excellent dinosaur footprints.

While the sign for the Potash dinosaur tracks is at one end of the parking area, the tracks themselves are located at the same end as the pit toilet (how scenic!). Starting from the outhouse, we scramble maybe 400 yards up the rocky cliff. The three-toed tracks are embedded in a grey rectangular mattress-shaped rock lying on the hillside.

Stairway to dino heaven.

The Potash dinosaur tracks are quite clearly printed in the rock. Perhaps these footprints are the answer to the mystery that archaeologists studying the Southwest have long puzzled over: why did the Anasazi, ancient inhabitants of this area, completely vanish long ago? Thanks to me, now we know! Yes, I deserve to get tenure for coming up with that one! Heck, I deserve to be chair!

The Potash Byway is full of scenic wonders.

Sunset on the cliffs off the Potash Byway.

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