The St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site (SGDS) in St. George, Utah is world renowned for its collection of spectacular fossil tracks and traces made by dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals on the shore of ancient Lake Whitmore 200 million years ago. The museum literally is built over the site where most of the fossils were found.
Above: Tooth of a meat-eating dinosaur recovered from 200-million-year-old rock layers currently being excavated by paleontologists from the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site (scale in centimeters). Photos via St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site.
Unusually, the site also has a collection of fossil bones from animals that lived in and around Lake Whitmore - it’s one of very few places anywhere in the world that preserves both bones of dead animals and traces made by live ones in the same location.
Now, paleontologists at the SGDS and from around Utah, Idaho, Colorado and Texas are starting a new dig into the long-buried layers of rock that produced the bones preserved at the site. These layers, made of sediments that formed at the bottom of Lake Whitmore, preserve fossils of many different kinds of fish, as well as tantalizing bones of dinosaurs. The dinosaur bones found thus far aren’t enough to determine if they belong to an already-known species of dinosaur, or something new.
“The potential for making new discoveries in these layers is very high,” says Andrew R.C. Milner, the curator and chief paleontologist at the SGDS. “Finding remains of a new kind of dinosaur in these rocks would be a dream come true and really flesh out what we know about the early stages of dinosaur evolution.”
The productive layers of rock are part of a set of layers geologists call the Moenave Formation. The dinosaur bones they have produced are some of the oldest known in Utah and some of very few of their age known in North America.
The clock is ticking on this dig because the City of St. George is scheduled to build a new electrical substation on the dig site - a large part of the substation would intersect the bone-bearing layers. “This is an ‘all hands on deck’ situation,” says Milner.
“The importance of the SGDS cannot be understated,” says Dr. Jim Kirkland of the Utah Geological Survey. “Its fossils tell a story unique in the prehistory of the American Southwest, and they are pivotal in understanding the beginning of the ‘Age of Dinosaurs.’”
The dig could use local help from anyone with access to, and certification to operate, heavy digging equipment such as a Bobcat, backhoe or frontend loader that would quickly remove the substantial amount of rock overlying the productive bone layers. “That would speed up our process immensely and allow more fossils to be discovered,” say Milner and Kirkland. Donations to rent such equipment are also welcome.
Anyone who can provide such a service is asked to contact the SGDS as soon as possible at (435)-590- 4190. The SGDS is located at 2180 East Riverside Drive in St. George and is open to the public from 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. every day. For more information about the site, visit utahdinosaurs.org
