Before they repaved paradise and put in a parking lot, they called the staff paleontologist. That’s protocol for Dinosaur National Monument, the remote, high desert outpost in northwestern Colorado where the Yampa and Green rivers converge, and that’s famous for — wouldn’t you know it — dinosaur fossils.
ReBecca Hunt-Foster, the park paleontologist, knew there was a high likelihood construction crews would find some new fossils as they dug up an old parking lot east of the famous Quarry Wall, an amalgamation of stegosaurus plates, allosaurus femurs, Camarasaurus vertebrae and 1,500 other fossil bones from 10 dinosaur species that visitors to the park can observe up close. The parking lot itself was built on the tailings and backfill from the original excavations of the site during the early 20th century. They decided to require a monitor be onsite during any surface-disturbing activities, Hunt-Foster said.
Bucket by bucket, the monitors discovered small fossils that had been tossed during the historical excavations. As the construction site neared a 12-foot-thick sandstone wall, the same geologic feature that preserved the Quarry Wall bones, Hunt-Foster and her team started keeping a very, very close eye on things.
That’s where, on Sept. 16, she spotted the tibia. “In a cross section, going down into the sandstone, which had been just inches under the surface,” Hunt-Foster said. “We restricted construction around the area while we assessed the discovery.”
The discovery turned out to be 14 tail vertebrae, a humerus, a radius, an ulna, a tibia, a fibula, “and a few toes,” Hunt-Foster said.
Park staff, a Utah Conservation Corps crew and volunteers removed 3,000 pounds of fossils and rock, revealing the bones of a large, long-necked dinosaur they believe to be a diplodocus, a common fossil from the late Jurassic period, roughly 150 million years ago, found in that bone bed. So far, they’ve collected about 20 feet of dinosaur. The herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs were typically about 80 feet long.
On Friday, the National Park Service announced the discovery. Though Hunt-Foster can tell that the animal stretches deeper into the hillside, they’ll have to wait until spring, after the threat of snow has passed, to continue excavations.
The last excavation to take place in that area was in 1924.
In 1909, the Pittsburgh-based paleontologist Earl Douglass, found eight giant tail bones of an apatosaurus — a late Jurassic longneck — sticking out of a sandstone slope in what is now the southwestern corner of the monument. The discovery kicked off a 13-year excavation, funded by the Carnegie Museum where Douglass worked, and attracting a constant stream of visitors from nearby towns in Utah to see the bones. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson established the quarry and its surrounding 80 acres as Dinosaur National Monument. These days, the monument extends across nearly 210,000 acres.
The museum pulled funding for the excavation site after Andrew Carnegie’s death in 1919, and the site was turned over to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in 1923, then to the University of Utah. By 1924, excavations had ceased, leaving behind the 150-foot-long slab that Douglass insisted remain open for the public to marvel at and learn from. That slab, the Quarry Wall, is now the backbone of the Quarry Exhibit Hall, which is on the Utah side of the sprawling monument.
The diplodocus is among the dinosaurs preserved in the Quarry Wall exhibit, allowing Hunt-Foster and her team to conveniently walk back and forth and compare the newly discovered specimen with one previously unearthed. Another diplodocus was collected in the same area by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in 1923.
Hunt-Foster said the team also found several clams around the new excavation unit, indicating a drought during the time that the fossils were preserved.
The excavated sections are currently being cleaned and studied at the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal, Utah. Visitors can view the work in the museum’s fossil preparation lab, or visit some of the newly discovered bones in the Quarry Exhibit Hall and the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum.
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