It may not be Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, but Dinosaur National Monument does have a lot of Jurassic-era dinosaurs. Dinosaur fossils, that is.
The fossils jut from a slanted wall of rock, protected inside a climate-controlled exhibit hall at this remote park in northwest Colorado that stretches into Utah. We visited in early May during our RV trip through national parks of the West.
More than 1,500 dinosaur fossils are embedded in the wall of bones. A catwalk lets you view the bones in the top of the wall.
At the bottom of the wall, you’re allowed to touch a few of the fossils, which are 150 million years old.
How did all these dinosaurs end up cemented in a wall of rock? I asked a ranger, and he explained that this area was once a watering hole. When it dried up during a long drought, the dinosaurs died. When the rains finally returned, the bones of larger animals, which had not been as scavenged or scattered, were washed together and buried in silt. In time, they became fossilized. Over eons, uplift pushed the fossil-encasing rock skyward. Over more millions of years, the exposed rock eroded, and some of the fossils became visible.
Carnegie Museum paleontologist Earl Douglass went hunting for dinosaur bones in Utah and found this motherlode in 1909.
Excavating fossils from the quarry became his life’s work.
Fossils were shipped off to museums in Pittsburgh, New York City, Toronto, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., and even to the University of Texas in Austin. But many were left in the wall where they were found, for visitors to marvel over today.
To figure out what you’re looking at…
…you can consult a brochure.
Bones and more bones
So many!
Here’s who they belonged to: Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Allosaurus, and Stegosaurus, among others.
Other fossilized animals that have been found in the quarry include crocodiles, turtles, and clams.
Murals and casts of fossils convey a sense of the living creatures and the swampy plain they inhabited, long before this area turned to mountainous desert.
A fossilized skull of carnivorous Allosaurus sits in a display case. You can understand how the mythology of dragons arose when you look at these ancient bones.
It’s good that humans didn’t have to coexist with such creatures.
While Dinosaur National Monument is free of the usual trappings one might expect to attract families with dino-loving children, there is a life-size Stegosaurus sculpture near the parking lot. It was made for a dinosaur exhibit at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair.
It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure more creatures like this from the extraordinary wall of bones.
Up next: Exploring Devils Tower in Wyoming. For a look back at petroglyphs along Utah Hwy 279, click here.
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