A cast of part of the track slab showing several trackways of two different sizes of pterosaurs.

A 900 lb. slab of rock with some of the best preserved pterosaur (flying reptile) tracks ever recognized was discovered on State Land in the San Rafael Swell near the town of Ferron by a team from Marietta College (Ohio).  This slab of rock from the Jurassic Summerville Formation preserves at least 9 separate trackways of 2 different sizes of pterosaurs that were walking along a tidal flat near the shore of the Curtis Sea.  We know the tracks were made by pterosaurs because, in addition to the hind foot prints, there are tracks made by the wings.  So, unlike birds that walk bipedally on their hind feet while folding their wings against their bodies, pterosaurs walked quadrupedally using their folded up wings to support the front of their bodies.  This site and the tracks were documented in a scientific publication in 2004 (Mickelson and others, 2004).

Because of the scientific importance of this slab, a team from the Utah Geological Survey (UGS) collected it in 2004 so that it could be placed in the Natural History Museum of Utah (the repository for all of the fossils collected by the UGS from public lands in Utah).  Due to its large size, this slab has been stored at the UGS’s Utah Core Research Center since collection.

Recently, the Natural History Museum of Utah agreed to loan the slab to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City for display in a new exhibit on pterosaurs.  On November 14, a team from Terry Dowd Inc. (a fine art packing company) came to the UGS to package the slab in a custom crate so that it could be transported by truck to New York.  The slab was cradled in ethafoam so that it will be well protected during the long drive to New York which began on November 19.  Eventually, the slab will be returned to the Natural History Museum of Utah for display.

deseretnews.com

A 656-page book chronicling the paleontological discoveries and success evidenced so far at Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument has been published, even as new discoveries continue to unfold on a near daily basis.
“I am here to emphasize that we are just getting started at the Grand Staircase,” said Alan Titus, the monument’s paleontologist. “We have a great big sandbox to play in.”

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The UGS’s Martha Hayden, Don DeBlieux, and Jim Kirkland with their complimentary copies of the volume.

Following the 1996 establishment of the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument (GSENM), paleontological research in this largely unstudied region of the nation accelerated at a remarkable pace, thanks to an infusion of research dollars from the federal government. Much of this research centered on the Upper Cretaceous of the Kaiparowits Plateau, which is at the center of the most continuous belt of terrestrial Cretaceous rocks anywhere in North America. The Utah Geological Survey was in the thick of it with early general survey projects and the later, more focused, Wahweap Project in the southern Kaiparowits Plateau from 2001–2005, which resulted in the discovery of Diabloceratops eatoni. Additionally, significant funded projects were undertaken by the Museum of Northern Arizona and the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU).

The results of this burst of scientific exploration has now been summarized in the massive  volume “At the Top of the Grand Staircase: The Late Cretaceous of Southern Utah,” edited by the Alan L. Titus (GSENM) and Mark Loewen (NHMU), published just this past month by Indiana University Press. The 634-page book includes 28 chapters, starting with papers on the geology and sedimentology of the regions, followed by papers on the fossil plants, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, turtles, lizards, crocodilians, marine reptiles, and chapters on each major group of dinosaurs. The UGS’s Jim Kirkland, Don DeBlieux, and Martha Hayden just received their complimentary copies of the volume for their contributions and will be spending the rest of the year looking over this magnificent contribution to our knowledge of Utah’s geological and paleontological record.

deseretnews.com

Weighing in at more than 2 tons and two dozen feet long, a new species of dinosaur related to Tyrannosaurus rex was fierce enough to be dubbed “King of Gore.” The discovery of “Lythronax argestes” at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah was announced Wednesday at the Natural History Museum of Utah and coincides with the publication of a study in PLoS ONE, an open access scientific journal.

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sciencedaily.com

A remarkable new species of tyrannosaur has been unearthed in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), southern Utah. The huge carnivore inhabited Laramidia, a landmass formed on the western coast of a shallow sea that flooded the central region of North America, isolating western and eastern portions of the continent for millions of years during the Late Cretaceous Period, between 95-70 million years ago. The newly discovered dinosaur, belonging to the same evolutionary branch as the famous Tyrannosaurus rex, was announced today in the open-access scientific journal PLOS ONE and unveiled on exhibit in the Past Worlds Gallery at the Natural History Museum of Utah at the Rio Tinto Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, Kane County, Utah
Photographer: Tyler Knudsen

Dinosaur skin is preserved at many Utah dinosaur sites. Fossilized dinosaur skin impressions, Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, Kane County, Utah.

sltrib.com

For paleontologists Randall Irmis and Andrew Milner, the tiny stuff matters, especially when you’re exploring the dawn of big reptiles. Microscopic fossilized pollen, two-inch fishes, even the color of the rock that bones are embedded in say a lot about the landscapes dinosaurs roamed, the climate, what they ate and what their prey ate.

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foxnews.com

A dinosaur skeleton discovered by an eagle-eyed high-school student turns out to be the smallest, youngest and most complete duck-billed dinosaur of its kind ever found. This Cretaceous-era herbivore, Parasaurolophus, walked the Earth some 75 million years ago. The dinosaurs in this genus are best known for their impressive tube-shaped head crests, which may have been used for display or perhaps to amplify the animals’ calls. The little specimen, dubbed “Joe,” was so young that its crest was a mere bump on its head.

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The UGS paleontology field program, Jim Kirkland, Don DeBlieux, and Scott Madsen, recently complete 2 weeks of field work at our Stike’s Quarry dinosaur site in eastern Utah.  This spectacular site has been the subject of news reports earlier this summer and is the site where a episode of the Discovery Channel television show Dirty Jobs was filmed in 2011.  This site contains the well-preserved remains of numerous dinosaurs, including adult and juvenile Utahraptor skeletons.  We have had difficulty removing the bones from this site because there are so many clustered together.  Because they are packed so closely together, we have had to use plaster and burlap to jacket a large block with the hope of one day using a large cargo helicopter to fly the block – now on the order of 5 tons – off of the large mesa on which it is located.   The large number of bones at this site, along with the nature of the sediments that they are preserved in, leads us to hypothesize that the animals were trapped in a dewatering feature (something similar to quicksand).   Our work this September focused on further excavating, isolating, and pedestaling the main block.  Work was initially hampered by several days of rain which pinned our team in camp unable to work or leave because the ground and roads became muddy and impassible.

As the weather cleared,

we were able to make good progress with an electric powered jack-hammer and pneumatic chisels to remove rock from around and under the block.  This was not the fine-detail, dental pick, and paint brush paleontology that many picture – but back breaking manual labor more akin to highway construction!

Many tons of rock where removed by hand and a tunnel was completed under the jacket leaving it on two large pedestals.


The exposed rock around the bone was covered in plaster to protect it from the elements.  Our final task to ready the block for transport, is to construct a wooden timber frame and box around the jacket to reinforce and stabilize it.  We hope to complete this work in the Spring of 2014.  We were assisted in the field by several volunteers from the Utah Friends of Paleontology.  The excavation was conducted under a permit from the State of Utah.  The BLM allowed us access to the site.

Dinosaurs were significant tourists, back in the day. Some enjoyed the area so much, they decided to stay. A few of them were even known to throw their weight around! The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) has provided a treasure trove of dinosaur discoveries. Of the 39 new dinosaur discoveries worldwide, nine have come from the GSENM!

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