June 8, 2024 @ 08:15 MDT
Site Visit #154
When I was in elementary school near Pittsburgh, Pa., our class would take field trips to the Carnegie Museum where we would gaze upon the giant dinosaur skeletons there. Today I visited the site from where those fossils came.
Dinosaur National Monument is spread across two states: Colorado and Utah, with the larger percent of land being in Colorado. However, the “good” stuff is in Utah.The main visitor center and the “quarry” (now more of an exhibit than a dig site) are in Utah, and that is where we went. (The Colorado section offers scenery but did not seem to offer fossils).
There isn’t much to the visitor center. A few exhibits show the area as it was millions of years ago, but there was no park video, which I found unusual. The primary thing to do in the visitor center is board the shuttle for the quarry site located a short distance away. It appears you can drive yourself to the quarry site, but the Park Service discourages that as parking is limited.
The quarry site is simply a two-story building covering the excavated side of a hill. From the parking area, we followed a ramp up to the entry, which is on the second floor. The inside of the building is simply an open platform with the hillside being one of the “walls”. Showing in the dirt of the hillside are hundreds of fossils. It looked almost fake to me, so I actually asked if this were a reproduction or real. He assured me it was real.
On the wall opposite the hillside, displays and exhibits showed who was involved in the excavation and and where many of the fossils went. It was here that I learned of the Carnegie Museum’s role and the ultimate destination of many fossils for my elementary school to see.
The lower level of the quarry building brings you closer to the hillside and has a few spots where you can (and are actually allowed to) touch actual 65+ million-year-old fossils. Opposite the hillside, some smaller creatures have been “reassembled” using casts of actual fossils. I think I would have avoided meeting even these smaller ones face-to-face when they roamed the world.
The trip to the visitor center and quarry took far less time than I had expected, so we were a little stuck on what to do next, as if we left, we would arrive at the evening’s hotel hours before check-in. That’s when we noticed that a “scenic drive” left the parking lot in the opposite direction from the park’s exit. We decided to check out the 14 stops along it’s 10 mile length.
The drive included some great scenery along with some petroglyphs still quite visible on the rocks. My daughter took the side trails up to a few for a close-up view, while I used binoculars and stayed by the car. Yes, I was being lazy!
The scenic drive easily burned off another 90 minutes of our day after which we headed across Utah for a night in Orem, south of Salt Lake City.
Steve
