Utah Monument Fabulously Fossiliferous

Unique dinosaur discoveries are turning up in southern Utah, particularly in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Among the region’s finds are dinosaurs previously unknown to science, a trail where a dinosaur plodded along dragging its tail, a sea creature with four-foot jaws and ancient Indian rock art that seems to suggest that North America’s earliest human inhabitants were curious about the extinct beasts.

“This state has the most continuous record of Cretaceous dinosaurs anywhere in the world, and basically the heart of the record is the Grand Staircase,” James I. Kirkland, Utah state paleontologist, said, referring to the national monument north of Lake Powell.

“We’re never going to know all the sites down there. It’s obviously an incredibly fossiliferous place.”

The exploration was spurred in part by the presidential proclamation that set up Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996. The proclamation says the area contains the most continuous records of Late Cretaceous terrestrial life in the world.

The Late Cretaceous period ended about 66.4 million years ago.

Getting the fossils out of the 1.7-million-acre monument can be a challenge. Last August, the Utah Geological Survey worked to extract the skull of a horned dinosaur called a ceratopsid.

The scientists had to use sheer brawn to drag it out because the region is off-limits to vehicles.

Kirkland described the effort in the recent edition of “Survey Notes,” published by the UGS. The skull was about a third of a mile away from the nearest road, and the excavation permit specified that no wheeled vehicle could be used to extract the massive sandstone blocks that contained the skull fragments, he wrote.

To drag the stone blocks to the road, the scientists jacketed the rock in protective plaster. They then used the roof of an old car as a sled, dragging it with a long rope.

Getting the skull out took five days. “Oh boy, that was hard,” Kirkland said.

Kirkland says cleaning the sandstone from the skull and stabilizing the fossil will take another year.

During an initial survey of the monument a University of Utah student discovered the trail of a sauropod, a big, long-necked, small-headed dinosaur. The tracks showed up clearly in the sandstone surface. It dates to the middle of the Jurassic, the era that preceded the Cretaceous period, he said.

In a different find, an Indian pictograph panel replicates a three-toed dinosaur footprint.

“In my mind, that’s got to be the earliest documentation of what a human being thought of a fossil site in North America,” Kirkland said. “This is probably the earliest clear evidence that early man was looking at these things and trying to figure out what they meant.”

Nearby, David D. Gillette, the former Utah state paleontologist who is now curator of the Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff, recently excavated a large skull east of Grand Staircase, in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

“We haven’t done the lab work on it yet,” he said. “It’s a seagoing reptile called a pliosaur,” which had paddles for feet. About 93 million years old, it had a large head and long jaws with conical teeth.

Gillette said researchers will resume excavations this spring and hope to get the rest of the body.

The dense fossils are stained red with iron, so they stand out dramatically from the gray shale, he added. The fossil was discovered by two southern Utah residents.