Dinosaur Bones at the “Dinosaur Wall”

While at Dinosaur National Monument, one of the first things we did was to visit the “dinosaur wall”.   This is the nice housing that was built to cover and preserve the exposed rock wall of dinosaur fossils that had been excavated.   During the peak of the summer, a shuttle bus takes tourist up to the enclosed quarry exhibit.  But since it is the off season, we were able to drive up and around the mountain to the big exhibit quarry building.

  

Fascinating that these creatures really did exist!  Their bones and skeletons are just as menacing as the dinosaurs in the movies!  Dinosaur Quarry is located in Utah just to the north of the town of Jensen.   This park has fossils of dinosaurs including Allosaurus , Abydosaurus , (a nearly complete skull, lower jaws and first four neck vertebrae of the specimen DINO 16488 found here at the base of the Cedar Mountain formation), and various long-neck, long-tail sauropods.  It was declared a National Monument on October 4, 1915.  The rock layer enclosing the fossils is a sandstone, and  conglomerate sandstone and conglomerate bed of alluvial bed of alluvial or river bed origin known as the Morrison Formation from the Jurassic  Period some 150 million years old. The dinosaurs and other ancient animals were washed into the area and buried presumably during flooding events.  The pile of sediments were later buried and lithified into solid rock. The layers of rock were later uplifted and tilted to their present angle by the mountain building forces that formed the Uintas. The relentless forces of erosion exposed the layers at the surface to be found by paleontologists.

  

The dinosaur fossil beds) were discovered in 1909 by Earl Douglass, a paleontologist working and collecting for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.  President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the dinosaur beds as Dinosaur National Monument in 1915.  The monument boundaries were expanded in 1938 from the original 80-acre tract surrounding the dinosaur quarry in Utah, to its present extent of over 200,000 acres in Utah and Colorado, encompassing the spectacular river canyons of the Green and Yampa. 

  

The "Dinosaur Wall" located within the Dinosaur Quarry building in the park consists of a steeply tilted rock layer containing hundreds of fossils.  The enclosing rock has been chipped away to reveal the fossil bones intact for public viewing.  It was announced in April 2009 that Dinosaur National Monument would receive $13.1 million to refurbish and reopen the gallery.  The Park Service successfully rebuilt the Quarry Exhibit Hall, supporting its weight on 70-foot steel micropile columns that extend to the bedrock below the unstable clay. The Dinosaur Quarry was reopened in Fall 2011. 

The exhibit hall has a winding walkway that allows for nice close views of the fossils from the bottom to the top of the preserved wall.  You don’t realize how huge even just one bone or skull really is until you are up close to it.   Sure glad there aren’t any of these guys around today!!

    

Interesting discovery to see and glad we decided to visit.