Mounted in an upstairs corner of the Prehistoric Museum in Price is a Utahraptor skeleton, a feathered dinosaur armed with a massive hooked claw on its second toe, which hunted Utah in packs back in the early Cretaceous.

Utahraptor's discoverer, museum founder Don Burge, once described this 7-foot-tall creature as "a real killing machine" resembling "a Tyrannosaurus mated with a chicken." So it's appropriate that this predator guard the door.

The paleontologist and curator who will soon occupy the boots once filled by Burge intends to remount the Utahraptor specimen in an active pose and re-install it in the museum's front entrance, now occupied by a tourist information kiosk.

Ken Carpenter, a scientist well versed in Utah paleontology and famous for his award-winning dinosaur mounts at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, will become director of the museum later this month. He replaces Reese Barrick, who left last year to join the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Kansas.

"When you walk in, the Utahraptor will be facing you and engaging you," Carpenter said. "We will rearticulate most of the skeletons in the kitty litter box," the large sand-filled display in the middle of the museum's paleontology wing whose central feature is an allosaurus. "They were done in the 1960s and their postures are way out of date. They have their tails dragging and they're standing there like a trophy mount."

Carpenter's hiring is seen as a promising omen for the little museum with big ambitions.

"He has a reputation as one of the best. It was a very good hire. This guy is going to do a lot of good. It's a good thing for the state," said state paleontologist James Kirkland, who was a grad student with Carpenter at the University of Colorado.

Since 1961, the College of Eastern Utah has operated the natural history museum, which holds accreditation from the American Association of Museums. As a young professor of geology, Burge started it on the second floor of city hall, taking over space vacated by the U.S. Forest Service.

It later moved into a city-owned gym at its current site on 100 North, which was expanded and renovated in 1991 to include separate wings for archaeology and paleontology totalling 25,000 square feet. Its cultural holdings have swelled to 750,000 artifacts, mostly pieces collected from nearby Fremont sites.

"The collection is so large that they aren't in the museum and there are a lot in the collection that should be on display," Carpenter said.

Some 40,000 people visit each year, making it one of Carbon County's premier tourist attractions. The college envisions a new $32 million home for the museum built on donated land on a bluff just west of town. The 110,000-square-foot building would include a Mesozoic Garden, but funding for the proposal has proved elusive.

Utah State University, which takes over CEU next month, has no immediate plans to raise money for a new museum, according to Ross Peterson, the university's vice president for advancement. The Logan campus, however, recently kicked off a campaign to raise the $4 million needed to convert a historic barn into a new home for its Museum of Anthropology.

Burge said Carpenter was a good choice for moving the museum forward.

"I'm really optimistic," said Burge, who is on emeritus status and volunteers at the museum. "He's got some great ideas. He's worked with us in the past. He's a prolific writer and he's writing about what we are interested in."

Carpenter is a world expert in armored dinosaurs and his research interest targets the late Cretaceous, an era that was largely unknown until 20 years ago when Utah's 126-million-year-old Cedar Mountain Formation began yielding specimen after specimen of previously unknown dinosaurs, including Utahraptor.

The museum's display is cast from the very fossil Kirkland and Burge unearthed in 1991 and used to identify Utahraptor as a new species.

In addition to his scholarship, Carpenter is known for mounting skeletons as if they were action figures.

"The point was to try to capture them with an X-ray photograph. It invites the visitor to imagine this animal when it was living," Carpenter said. He put his ideas in motion in Denver, where he staged an allosaurus and stegosaurus in combat and two coelophysises running side by side.

Carpenter hopes improvements at the existing Prehistoric Museum will show potential donors what a new museum will look like. He plans to initiate brainstorming sessions in the fall to generate new ideas for the museum.

bmaffly@sltrib.com —

Prehistoric Museum

Where • College of Eastern Utah, 155 E. 100 North, Price

More info • 435-613-5060 or museum.ceu.edu.