Utah - Day 4 - Dinosaur National Monument

Vernal/Dinosaurland, Vernal

Monday, 4 October 2021

One of the places I'd wanted to visit when I was in Colorado was the Dinosaur National Monument.  It was quite a way out of my way but I was really interested.  Then I learned at their website that all the dinosaur bones on display were at the Utah piece of the monument (it spans both states).  I didn't much want to drive a long way just to see mountains where someone had already found bones, me not being a geologist or paleontologist or whatever specialty it is.  But this place was at the top of my list for things to see when I came to Utah.

When I first made my campground reservation for Vernal, I had no idea it was so close to the monument.  I thought that "Dinosaurland" tag was about some theme park or other.  But it turned out that what Vernal meant when it adopted that nickname was that it was on the edge of the area where dinosaur bones had been discovered.  So I stayed over a couple of days to be sure I could go see them.

It was worth the wait and worth the drive (about a half hour each way).  

today's route

Actually, today's route only ran 23 miles to the national monument, but I included part of Colorado to show how far the monument stretches.  In Utah, the destination isn't really the Visitor Center but instead the Quarry Exhibit Hall a half mile or so farther down the road.  That's where you can see the Wall of Bones.

Quarry Exhibit Hall

This Exhibit Hall is built around that big rock on the right.  Embedded in that rock are hundreds of dinosaur bones.  The man who discovered this site, Earl Douglass, asked that visitors be given this experience and, for once, the government listened.  

Entrance is on the 2nd floor to allow us to see bones that are high up on the hill.  There's a ramp down to the street level so we can see the bones farther down.  I've got some photos from both areas.

I was trying to give a feel for how high this rock wall is,
but I took this photo from the 2nd floor so it can't show all of it.

Can you see all the bones?  They're real and this is
the way they were found - they haven't been moved.

This photo and the next one were taken on the 1st floor.

Signs encourage people to touch the bones.

In 1909, Earl Douglass thought this area might hold evidence of dinosaurs, so he came to look.  He found 8 tail bones of a dinosaur sticking out of the ground.  I didn't believe that story until I saw how near the surface some of the bones in my photos are.  The photo at left may have been taken when he made his discovery, but they don't say.

It only took 5 days for tourists to start
arriving.  And this was before Twitter.

Almost a century later, we know he was right about
both the "astounding" and the "instructive" parts.

Since 1909, the fossils of more than 400 dinosaurs have been discovered here.  They know from other excavations that the bones we can see on this wall are just the start, and that many more are still embedded in the hill behind the wall.

Eventually they discovered that this soil was unstable not only from all the dinosaur bones, but also because it's composed of bentonitic soils that expand and contract.  The first visitor center they built started crumbling not long after it was finished.  Built in 1958, it was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2001 but, by 2006, it was too unstable to be used.  In 2011 they rehabbed/rebuilt the building, starting with columns extending down into bedrock, and that's where I saw the bones.

The exhibits included fossils of turtles and ferns and evidence of termites (holes in dinosaur bones) and all kinds of things.  But they also gave us this warning.

Apparently, this area ended up being a bone yard, where bones from other areas were deposited in a big mass.  That's why the bones in the wall seemed jumbled up and weren't in whole skeletons.  Nonetheless, they have found a few whole skeletons, which have been of immense importance.

The Camarasaurus was the most common
sauropod in this whole area, but until finding this
skeleton, they weren't sure what it looked like.

I have to assume they're guessing on the coloration.

I think this is the skeleton they're referring to -
the nearly complete Camarasaurus.

Another species they found was the Allosaurus.  They found an almost complete skull here at this site.

And this is the skull.

And not far from this quarry site, an almost complete skeleton of another Allosaurus was found.

The family at the tail end gives an idea of its size.

This is their guess of what an Allosaurus
looked like.  (Why orange, do you suppose?)

I asked one of the park rangers how could something so enormous, and presumably heavy, walk around on 3 toes, as shown in the skeleton reconstruction.  She told me that for one thing, they think dinosaur bones were much lighter than ours.  They were, after all, the ancestors of birds which have somewhat hollow bones.  So while the dinosaurs were massive, they weren't sure just how much they weighed.  And for another thing, she pointed out that deer walk around on 2 toes and horses on 1 toe (basically) so there's precedent in the animal kingdom.  And she didn't mention it so I will: the skeleton is shown on its tippy-toes, but the drawing is shown as flat-footed, so this may be something else they don't know.  It may be that it ran on its toes (we do) but it walked flat-footed.

You'd think that, since people have been hunting them for so long, and since the dinosaurs aren't around any more to file a legal claim to privacy, and since their bones aren't moving anywhere, that we wouldn't still be learning new things about them and discovering new bones.  But here's the area surrounding the exhibit hall.

Where do you start chipping away for dinosaurs?

And I'm going to include a couple of photos of foliage here.

These both seem to belong to the succulent family somehow - the way they look and how they grow.  But I have no idea what either of them is.  

What I do know is that the one on the right can hurt.  There was some at the Rawlins KOA and Gracie once pooped right next to it.  When I cleaned up after her, I got stuck with some kind of prickly something.  They don't look prickly, but they are.

Back to Vernal

The quarry is bounded by farming country, complete with cows and crops.  I saw a pen with 3 Longhorns in it.  In a cropfield I saw a flock of very large birds and guessed at either turkeys or cranes.  The bird book says turkeys live here year-round but no species of crane comes to Utah.  And according to the book, they're about the same size.  I'd've thought cranes were much bigger, but the book says the Wild Turkey is 46", and the Sandhill Crane is 41"-48" (and visits every other western state but Utah).  So I guess it was a flock of turkeys.

I saw a sign on an open farm gate that said, "Shut the Damn Gate."

Back in Vernal, I stopped at the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum.  They have more dinosaurs.  I thought entrance was free because it didn't say a word about a fee either online or in their brochure.  But the first thing I saw when I walked in was a sign saying adults needed to pay $7.00.  So instead of visiting the museum, I asked for and received a brochure about state campgrounds, which will make things much easier, me not always having an internet signal.

I forgot to mention that when I first left the campground this morning, I stopped at a vet clinic to get Lily's claws clipped and her flea medicine applied for the month.  I doubt seriously if she'll be in danger of fleas since winter's coming on, but an ounce of prevention . . . .  She sulked for quite a while, but I was glad to have one less thing to worry about.

All in all, it was a fascinating and productive day.