Tag Archive for: Paleontology

Utah Geological Survey

UGS Official News Release: Utah Geological Survey Partners with Thanksgiving Point to Prepare 125 Million Year Old Utahraptor Fossils

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

Utah Geological Survey

Stikes Utahraptor excavation

Stikes Utahraptor excavation 1 Scott Madsen
UGS paleontologist Scott Madsen cutting the plaster jacket off of the bottom of a block from the Stikes Utahraptor excavation. This roughly 1,000 lb block, dubbed “The Mushroom”, and containing the remains of Iguanodont and Utahraptor dinosaurs, was collected from on top of the large 18,000 lb. block of dinosaur fossils that was dragged off of a mesa in eastern Utah in the fall of 2014.

Stikes Utahraptor excavation 2 Scott Madsen
Scott Madsen begins the preparation of “The Mushroom” in the UGS paleontological laboratory.

Utah Geological Survey
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Utah’s Dinosaur ‘Death Trap’ Reveals Trove of Giant Predators

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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Utah Geological Survey

On a dino crusade in Utah, tracks don’t always follow the map

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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John Good
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Prehistoric Shorebirds Waded Alongside Their Dinosaur Cousins

nationalgeographic.com

Birds are dinosaurs. This fact is easily understood by looking at the scaly feet of a chickadee or by comparing a chicken wing to a Velociraptor arm. But given that birds are the only “terrible lizards” around today, it’s easy to forget that they also thrived alongside their non-avian kin for 84 million years. The first birds evolved in the Late Jurassic, roundabout 150 million years ago, and they became a widespread and successful branch of the dinosaur family tree.

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Utah Geological Survey
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Paleontologists identify oldest horned dinosaur in North America

Check out the latest dino news! One of our paleontologists, Scott Madsen, discovered this little guy in 1997 in what is called the Cloverly Formation in southern Montana. Utah State Paleontologist, James Kirkland, talks more about the fossil’s significance in this article.

cbsnews.com

Paleontologists have identified the fossil of a horned dinosaur the size of a house cat that is the oldest of its kind ever discovered in North America – by 15 million years.

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Utah Geological Survey
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Damaged fossil to become a teaching tool

ksl.com

A fossil damaged by vandals in September has been removed from its place along the monument’s popular Fossil Discovery Trail so it can be used as a teaching tool.

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Utah Geological Survey
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Utah Geological Survey Paleontologists Help Move a Petrified Tree

 

UGS paleontologists Jim Kirkland and Don DeBlieux spent last week assisting a crew from Utah State Parks and the Escalante Petrified Forest State Park in moving a large petrified tree to the park for display. The park received permission from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to move the tree from land they manage just outside the town of Escalante, and they called in UGS paleontologists to consult with and oversee the move. Several pieces of heavy equipment were needed to lift the log, which was already separated into sections, onto a flatbed truck for the several-mile drive to the park. Eighteen sections were moved, including the base of the tree that was estimated to weigh over 2 tons, and lifted back into place in the sand-filled concrete enclosure that had been constructed to house the tree. The park is known for its large number of petrified logs eroding out of the 150-million-year-old Morrison Formation rocks. These logs are found on a plateau above the park entrance that can only be accessed by a fairly rugged hike, so not all visitors will have the time or the ability to see them. By having a large tree on display near the visitors center, many more people, including those with physical challenges, will be able to view and learn about the fossils found in this region. The cooperation of the BLM and State Parks for the benefit of Utah citizens and visitors was well exemplified during this project.

Utah Geological Survey
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Greater Canyonlands: An Undiscovered Paleontological Treasure Trove

We know that ‪#‎NationalFossilDay‬ was yesterday, but we love fossils so much that we wanted to share this great article on Utah’s Greater Canyonlands dino treasures.

suwa.org

Today, October 15th is National Fossil Day! We celebrate it with the acknowledgement that as a repository of scientific discovery, Greater Canyonlands holds a treasure trove of found and yet-to-be-found paleontological secrets.

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Utah Geological Survey
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Dinosaur bone fossils at the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah.

smithsonianmag.com

Fossils predate the written record by billions of years, but their impact on human history—and the way humans percieve the world around them—has been palpable for centuries. By offering a rare glimpse into worlds forgotten or unknown, fossils have long fascinated humans. Sometimes, fossils inspired mythology and folklore—in fourth century China, a historian mistook a fossilized dinosaur bone for a dragon bone. Other times, fossils gave scientists the physical evidence needed to piece together the natural history of life on Earth—in the late 1700s, fossil discoveries helped scientists understand the concept of extinction. Today, studying the fossil record remains as critical as ever. As the Earth’s climate continues to change, understanding how previous species adapted (or didn’t) to changes in the past gives scientists an indication about how we might respond to changes in the future.

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