USU Eastern uncovers buried dino fossils
USU Eastern is in the heart of dinosaur country, where fascinating discoveries are commonplace, said Ken Carpenter, associate vice chancellor of USU Eastern and director of the university’s Natural History Museum.
USU Eastern has always had the most impressive paleontology program in the state, Casey Dooms, a geology major, said, and he said recent finds have even changed what’s found in textbooks.
“Before we found this claw, recently, paleontologists thought this dinosaur evolved in Asia and migrated here,” Dooms said about a recent discovery. “Due to the dating of this claw, we now know it was the other way around.”
Dooms said he personally found a handful of sites containing fossils. Other older sites are still full of undiscovered fossils, he said.
The Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur quarry contains the densest concentration of Jurassic-aged bones ever found — many of them still underground — and it is only a half-hour away from USU Eastern, Dooms added.
There is more real bone in USU Eastern’s museum than any other museum in the state, and there are dozens of dig sites close by, said John Bird, bone lab manager. The close proximity to dig sites is part of the reason Carpenter said he moved from his job at a museum in Denver, to accept the job in Price as museum director.
“When I lived in Denver it took me six hours to get to an excavation site,” Carpenter said. “From Price it only takes about a half-hour.”
The abundance of dig sites and the huge backlog of excavated fossils is a little overwhelming, Bird said. But because of the recent merger with USU, he said he hopes this summer students from Price and Logan will sign up to work together with the paleontologists.
Anyone who volunteers will almost certainly get to excavate dinosaur bones, Bird said. Some of the most recent digs have unearthed therazinosaurs and nodosaurs.
“My first semester I took a fossil prep class,” Dooms said. “I dealt with real fossils and got them ready for display in the museum. Most institutions, you wouldn’t be able to do stuff like that until grad school.”
Dooms said on his first dig he discovered eolambia, the missing link between bipedal and four-legged dinosaurs.
“It’s a really unique opportunity,” Dooms said. “Last summer we found a phytosaur — a crocodile that lived before the dinosaurs.”
USU Eastern’s constant dinosaur discoveries have a long history of making news, Carpenter said. For example, USU Eastern students’ discovery of a stegosaurus spike in an allosaurus vertebrae proved to the world that stegosaurs did indeed use their tails as weapons, he said.
The museum’s notoriety has brought plenty of guests, and Carpenter said he plans on renovating the museum to make it more exciting for the large slew of visitors that come annually.
“We are currently refurbishing the Utah raptor, which will greet visitors when they first walk in the door,” Carpenter said. “We are putting it in a more dynamic pose, which gives people a flavor of what it was really like.”
The museum houses the first Utah raptor discovered, Carpenter said. By changing the raptor’s pose as well as the poses of other dinosaurs, he said he hopes to more clearly illustrate to guests that these were once living, mobile creatures.
“This elephant was found just east of Price—the highest elevation an elephant has ever been found in North America.” Carpenter said, pointing to an elephant fossil posed in combat with a human skeleton. “But when I got here this very real looking display was not done.”
Carpenter said he was passionate about bridging the gap between the fossils and real life in the minds of people.
He commissioned a large diorama that blends fossils and genuine looking plant and animal sculptures to recreate an ancient ecosystem, and he turned some of the storage rooms into fossil-restoration rooms, where guests can view USU students at work.
However, the constant new discoveries are quickly filling up the museum, and a more large-scale renovation will be necessary before long, Carpenter said.
“We only have about 15 percent of our storage left,” he said. “There is a definite need for expansion.”
Carpenter said he does not necessarily see this as a problem.
“We’re trying to tell a story that people haven’t heard before,” he said. “Expansion is exciting.”
– evan.millsap@aggiemail.usu.edu