Dinosaur-Fossil Museum Sought Near Moab

The state paleontologist would like to see a museum and park near Moab to show off a unique resource: the Cedar Mountain formation, where a slew of dinosaur fossils are being uncovered.

The Dalton Well site is on state land, and the proposed facility would be a state park. The paleontologist, Jim Kirkland, concedes that lately state parks have been taking a beating in the budget.

But a museum at Dalton Well would be a great addition to the Moab area, he says, and it would highlight an important scientific resource.

Of dinosaur quarries in the early part of the Cedar Mountain formation, Kirkland says the Dalton Well site is the biggest. “It probably goes half a mile,” he said.

This isn’t the first time a museum has been proposed for Dalton Well. Earlier, Moab officials worked on a feasibility study, but the plans fell through. The visitors center would have cost $15 million, Kirkland says, and that was too much.

But he said a scaled-down version would let visitors look through spotting telescopes at excavations going on in a dinosaur quarry on a nearby cliff. He said its displays would explain the surprising discoveries made there and elsewhere in the Cedar Mountain formation.

The formation loops through a section of east-central Utah from south of Emery, along the San Rafael Swell near Ferron and Castle Dale. It reaches its northernmost exposure a bit southeast of Price, then dips toward Moab.

Dating to between 98.5 million and 124 million years ago, the Cedar Mountain formation fills a gap in knowledge about animals from the early Cretaceous era.

Researchers from Brigham Young University in Provo have worked on and off at Dalton Well since the 1970s, Kirkland said. It is of great scientific importance, he added.

“I just think it’s an incredible asset to Moab,” he said. “There’s 100 years of work to be done there.”

For most of the United States, few remains date to the period.

But this formation, about 300 or 400 feet thick at the most, preserves a menagerie of fossil animals from the era. “It represents about 30 million years,” he said.

A great deal was happening then. American dinosaurs of the early Cretaceous resemble their counterparts in Europe probably because there was a land connection to Europe.

“But then sea levels rose and North America became isolated,” he said. It was an island continent, like Australia, for 15 million to 20 million years, and dinosaurs developed differently from those elsewhere.

Suddenly, in the late Cretaceous period, a land bridge formed in Alaska and dinosaurs from Asia migrated into what is now the United States, he said.

All three epochs are represented in the Cedar Mountain formation, Kirkland said. “It’s an incredible period of position.”

If a museum is established on state land at Dalton Well, Kirkland thinks it should be administered by one of the two public universities in Utah that are repositories for fossils found on federal land. Those are the University of Utah and the College of Eastern Utah, Price.

Also, since BYU has been excavating this quarry, he said, that university should continue to be the principal investigator at Dalton Well.

Reese Barrick, curator of paleontology at CEU’s Prehistoric Museum, says he would like his facility to serve as the umbrella agency for a new center there.

Dinosaurs found there are “from the Cedar Mountain formation, which is sort of what our museum’s specialty is,” he said.

“There’s been a lot of really important bones that have come out of there. And it’s a gorgeous area, just outside of Moab.”

Leading the BYU excavations in recent years is Brooks Britt, geology professor. He pointed out that bones from Dalton Well are fragmented, but that’s part of the story.

“So far we’ve pulled parts of 44 dinosaurs out of there,” Britt said. They represent nine species.

About 97 percent of the bones are broken. After the animals died, they were scavenged, “and then other dinosaurs walked on top of the bones and broke them,” he said.

Insects bored into the bones, some of which may have lain on the ground for 10 years before they were buried. A flooding river moved them a couple of hundred yards, he said, and “they were walked on again . . . .

“It’s a great story in terms of what we can learn about what’s happened some 120 million years ago. We’re playing CSI investigators here.”

An odd aspect is that many of the dinosaurs died when they were in the equivalent of their teen years. Why they died is a mystery.

Some died later than others, and “they’re much more complete.” Four different floods seem to have washed the dinosaur bones.

So far, the scientists have uncovered armored dinosaurs with spikes bristling from their bodies from head to tail. They have found big sauropods, vegetarians related to what used to be called the brontosaurus.

There is a relative to the duckbill dinosaurs, an Iguanodon more than 30 feet long with a knee a foot wide and a small sail along its back.

Four meat-eater species were found, too. The most common is the Utahraptor, a fearsome predator with a huge slashing talon. (Kirkland was instrumental in the discovery of the fierce creature.)

“This place is Utahraptor Central,” Brit joked. “We’ve got more bones than have ever been found in all other places combined, in this one spot.”

Three other meat-eaters have been found there, two of them not yet named. One of the predators had long, gracile legs, he said.

The animals died near a lake, and streams fed into the lake, Britt added. Dinosaurs would walk to the water and leave footprints, which are preserved along with mud cracks and crayfish burrows.

“There’s nowhere else in North America that has as many dinosaurs of this age, the early Cretaceous, at one spot,” Britt said. “It’s a pretty cool story.”

E-mail: bau@desnews.com