^TM

Tracking Dinosaurs in Northeast Utah

By Craig Lancto

Dinosaurs. 

The Smithsonian’s dinosaur fossils in the Natural History Museum are interesting in a detached sort of way. It is difficult to connect those old bones —and casts of bones —with living, breathing creatures that tromped the earth for millions of years, millions of years ago. It’s difficult enough to get my mind around the “millions of years” part without accepting that these creatures—which since my childhood have always seemed born of my plastic replicas more than vice versa—really existed.

So when the Utah Tourism Coalition offered an opportunity to meet the terrible lizards on their home ground, I flew to them.

With Emery County Sheriff, LaMar Guymon, as our guide, we headed into the San Rafael Swell, a rugged patch of high desert with striking views of natural formations, canyons, and cliffs, with a mini Grand Canyon (It’s plenty more impressive than that diminutive implies.) and the giant billboard cliff of Buckhorn Wash with life-size figures that were painted thousands of years ago.

Eating up miles of kidney-rattling dirt road, we reached a singularly unimpressive one-story building, small and drab, at a place called Cleveland Lloyd Quarry. More is the wonder, then, that inside, I began to glimpse the reality of  roaring carnivores and placid herbivores. It didn’t hurt that Mike Leschin, the site’s director, knows and loves this place. It shows in his animation and enthusiasm as he explains the mysteries of Cleveland Lloyd.

For example, carnivore fossils outnumber herbivores by a ratio of 3:1, an imbalance that nature wouldn’t tolerate.

For another,  more than fifteen thousand bones, thirty complete dinosaur skeletons, and a dinosaur egg have been excavated from a site that is the size of a modest building lot. Why have so many accumulated in one place?

Why has the site yielded more Allosaurs, kings of the Jurassic period, than any other site in the world?

By the time we reached the dig, I had already migrated slightly from believing in dinosaurs in the abstract to accepting them in my gut. The visitor’s center displayed jawbones and gizzard stones, and a range of other fossils that seemed more genuine because of the austere setting.

The excavation site is pretty much contained in two sheds about the size of double wide trailers.  Entering by way of a ground-level scaffolding enabled us to look down into the excavation at fossils that have not been removed, and replicas of some marking the sites where they had been retrieved. The director smiled as he surveyed the site. “It is impossible to dig [here] without finding dinosaur fossils” he observed.

When Leschin allowed me to descend into the excavation to take pictures of Stegosaurus teeth in situ,  I felt like the teacher’s pet. I was also surprised to realize that I would never have recognized them as being related to dinosaurs. I have always pictured fossils as articulated skeletons, bones lying together as if the dinosaur had fallen and fossilized on the spot. It had never occurred to me that they might be scattered around in bits that don’t look remotely dinosaur-like to the untrained eye.

While we were there, Leschin demonstrated how the bones are extricated by undercutting them, wrapping them in burlap, and encasing them in plaster of paris before attempting to remove them.

Returning along the winding sidewalk from the excavation site to the visitor’s center, I marveled at how far I had come—in only a few hours—toward accepting in my heart of hearts that dinosaurs were real.

From Cleveland Lloyd, we drove about 25 miles to Price to visit the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum. Curator Reese Barrick quickly dispelled the notion that Mike Leschin’s enthusiasm was unique. As we toured the Museum, Barrick pointed out the jawbone of an Allosaurus, with tooth buds ready to move into position when the dinosaur lost a tooth, just as sharks do. Not for the first time, I found myself saying, “I didn’t know that.”

Seeing the skeleton of the Utahraptor, which served to verify that Spielberg’s raptors were not much larger than actual raptors as scientists had thought, was exciting.  The ripping claw, which I remembered from “Jurassic Park,” sent a frisson of realization through me.

Equally fascinating was the piece of fossilized Stegosaurus skin that again brought home the reality of the great reptiles’ existence.

The next morning we ingested artery-clogging scones (much closer relatives to beignets than anything a Scot might recognize as a scone) from a local shop as we headed slightly more than a hundred miles toward Vernal, Utah, and Dinosaur National Monument.

At Dinosaur Monument, a cliff face has been retained to show how rich in fossils is the Morrison Formation (which includes Cleveland Lloyd). In the 1940s, two paleontologists were brought in to sculpt away anything that doesn’t look like a fossil, better to display the more than 2,000 of them visible in the wall.              

Here, the visitors center has been erected over the rock face to shelter it from further erosion. Since Earl Douglass came to retrieve reptile bones for the Carnegie Museum in the early twentieth century, about 350 tons of fossils have been taken from the site, including a nearly complete young  camarasaurus.

Curiously enough, the most compelling evidence of the reality of dinosaurs was almost an afterthought.

Returning from a particularly satisfying and delicious breakfast at Red Canyon Lodge, (Owner Mark Wilson assured me that the intensely flavorful bacon was from Virginia.) we stopped at Red Fleet Reservoir to see dinosaur tracks. A park ranger saved us the walk around the reservoir with a brief boat ride to a rock shelf that ascended from the water at about a 45 degree angle. We scrambled up the rock to find one footprint about a foot long. It looked almost like a very large, heavy maple leaf had left its imprint. Another footprint stood out a few feet away, but it looked different from the first. It was the set of footprints that awed me.

Standing behind the first print that we found, we saw another a few feet ahead and to the left and another a few feet ahead of that. It was the pattern of footprints that won me over. I understood and believed that I stood where dinosaurs had walked millions of years ago. I realize that the rock had been buried under many millennia of sediment before surfacing through erosion and upheaval, but it was real and I saw it.

Our final stop was the Utah Field House. Although Park Manager Steve Sroka pointed out, it is more dedicated to showing what paleontologists do than to displaying fossils, the wall panel of leaf fossils (some of which Sroka himself had collected) was riveting, especially in that some of the specimens appeared as fresh as if they had fallen from a tree within the past few days, rather than lying in the bed of a lake for millions of years.            

So after more than a half-century of half-believing that dinosaurs were a Hollywood gimmick, I became a true believer in only a couple of days in Northeast Utah.

The author is grateful for the support and assistance of Utah! Travel Regions Association.

Back to TravelLady Magazine