Tag Archive for: dinosaurs

ksl.com

The original Utahns weren’t nearly as willing to bring you a casserole, but who wants to look at fossilized Relief Society presidents?

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kutv.com

A 125-million-year-old fossil was delivered to Thanksgiving Point’s Museum of Ancient Life in Lehi, nearly 15 years after a graduate student discovered the dinosaur site.

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A BIG BIG “Thanks” to Cross Marine Projects of American Fork for helping us move our nearly 9-ton Utahraptor fossil block from our UGS headquarters in Salt Lake City down to Thanksgiving Point’s Museum of Ancient Life in Lehi today.

Stikes Block SLC to Thanksgiving Point 1 Stikes Block SLC to Thanksgiving Point 2 Stikes Block SLC to Thanksgiving Point 3 Stikes Block SLC to Thanksgiving Point 4 Stikes Block SLC to Thanksgiving Point 5

March 17, 2015

Utahraptor fossil stikes block 3

Utahraptor fossil stikes block 2

Utahraptor fossil stikes block 1

Salt Lake City – March 17, 2015 – The Utah Geological Survey (UGS) has signed an agreement with Thanksgiving Point Institute to extract and prepare the fossils of a pack of Utahraptors encased in a nine-ton sandstone block.

Utahraptors are the oldest known dromaeosaurids, or bird-like therapod dinosaurs. They resemble Steven Spielberg’s Velociraptor from the movie Jurassic Park, but are much larger and believed to be a more ferocious predator.

On Wednesday, March 18th, Cross Marine Projects of American Fork will generously donate their services to relocate the sandstone block from the Utah Department of Natural Resources (DNR) in Salt Lake City to Thanksgiving Point’s Museum of Ancient Life in Lehi. Upon securing the necessary funding, one of the world’s top micropreparators, UGS geologist Scott Madsen, and his colleagues may spend up to five years preparing the fossils in the museum’s paleo lab, begining as early as May.

The museum’s paleo lab has a public observation room and will be equipped with video microscopes to feed video footage into the museum. This public access will give museum visitors an educational opportunity to see firsthand the extensive detail and care paleontologists use to prepare fossils.

“This will allow museum guests to see real science happening in real time,” stated Rick Hunter, Thanksgiving Point paleontologist. “We fully expect to learn much more about raptor behavior and the growth stages from juvenile to adult in Utahraptor. This is going to be huge for paleontology.”

“Thanksgiving Point has the only paleo lab in the region suitable to work on such a large block,” said James Kirkland, UGS State Paleontologist. “This discovery has the best preserved and most complete Utahraptor skeletons ever found. Normally we’d break a large discovery like this into smaller blocks. But this one is so rich with intertwined skeletal remains that we couldn’t split it without hitting skeleton.”

Preliminary analysis of the 125 million year old sandstone indicates the block contains the remains of at least six, and possibly many more, Utahraptors, including one adult, four juveniles, and one baby. Preservation within the block appears exceptional, lending to the hope that details such as feather impressions may be preserved. Bones of at least two iguanodont dinosaurs were also discovered within the sandstone block, leading Utah paleontologists to believe the Utahraptors were hunting when they became mired in quicksand, buried, preserved, and fossilized.

UGS paleontologists originally extracted the mega-block from the Stikes Quarry, which is located on Utah State land in east-central Utah, north of Arches National Park. Matt Stikes, a former graduate student at Northern Arizona University, discovered the site and reported it to the UGS in 2004. Last year Cross Marine Projects donated their services to recover the nine-ton block from its steep hillside location and move it to DNR. All fossils within the block are owned by the State of Utah and after preparation, their final repository will be with the Natural History Museum of Utah.

Media Contact
Mark Milligan
Utah Geological Survey
801-537-3326 (office)
markmilligan@utah.gov

phenomena.nationalgeographic.com

Dinosaurs are Mesozoic superstars. The largest literally overshadowed other forms of life during their prehistoric heyday, and even now they attract far more attention than any other group of ancient organisms. It’s easy to forget the diverse and disparate species that wove together the ecology that helped support the dinosaurs we are so enchanted by.

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smithsonianmag.com

Roughly a quarter of a billion years ago, an apocalypse struck the Earth. Known as the Great Dying, it claimed more lives than any other mass extinction known to science, including the one that did in the non-avian dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Over 90 percent of all species on the planet were wiped out, from armor-clad trilobites in the oceans to giant reptiles on land. The host of strange creatures vanished, giving way to the ancestors of modern flora and fauna.

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upr.org

Inside a nine-ton sandstone block pulled from a mesa outside of Moab could be the key to knowing how the carnivorous Utahraptor lived. But before paleontologists can figure that out, State Paleontologist James Kirkland says they are going to have to find a place where they can start chipping away at the block.

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perfscience.com

Paleontologists have unearthed the largest trove of fossils ever discovered from Utahraptor, a feathered dinosaur. According to the paleontologists, the fossils of six Utahraptor dinosaurs were trapped in a block of sandstone.

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Remember the family of Utah Raptors that arrived in a 9-ton ‘block’ in Salt Lake City a few months ago? Our Paleontologists here at the UGS have been working very closely on this project for years. Check out this wonderful highlight on their work so far, where you can see interviews from Utah State Paleontologist James Kirkland, and Paleontologists, Don DeBlieux and Scott Madsen.

news.nationalgeographic.com

A nine-ton block of sandstone that was pulled from a Utah mountain late last year holds the biggest fossil trove ever found of the giant predatory dinosaur known as Utahraptor. Covered in feathers, with a huge sickle claw on each second toe, Utahraptor looked like a pumped-up version of the Jurassic Park star Velociraptor.

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And further reading in this article below…

Fossil treasure trove in quicksand reveals ancient dinosaur death trap

washingtonpost.com

Reports of what looked like a human arm brought Utah state paleontologist James Kirkland to a particular sandstone hill in 2001. But it turned out that his graduate student had actually found something entirely different — a veritable mass grave of Utahraptor dinosaurs. Now they’ve found the remains of six individual dinosaurs, and there may still be more inside of the 9-ton sandstone block they’re excavating.

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washingtonpost.com

Gray-green plateaus and rock formations in a palette of fiery oranges and browns take up much of the landscape on the 400-mile drive from St. George, Utah, to Dinosaur National Monument. Arid and sprawling, it’s not the subtropical terrain that made up the late Mesozoic era, but that didn’t stop the 5-year-old aspiring paleontologist in the back seat from imagining a hungry allosaurus or herd of sauropods pounding across the land in search of dinner.

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