Font ResizeGRAND STAIRCASE ESCALANTE NATIONAL MONUMENT - Halfway down a sandy slope, paleontologist Alan Titus drops to his knees and reaches out to delicately trace the fossilized skin of a 75 million-year-old dinosaur.
Embedded in sandstone, the tiny bumps - skin impressions from a duck-billed dinosaur - momentarily connect Titus with the lush, subtropical environment that once dominated today's desolate badlands.
"This is fantastic," he says, not least because the rock, which includes fossilized ribs and tendons, resembles a beautiful free-form sculpture. "Paleontologists can spend their
whole careers and not see something this cool."
The monument's paleontologist discovered this site deep inside the rugged national monument several years ago and believe it contains a dinosaur species new to science. Several research groups scattered throughout the 1.9 million acre monument in recent years have unearthed at least nine potentially new species that will be formally announced in the coming years.
While Utah's original heyday of paleontology came to an end in the 1920s, another crop of researchers basks today in a new golden age.
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Thirst for fossils
Utah's first golden age sprang from fossil-collecting wars in the late 1800s waged by wealthy scientists O.C. Marsh of Yale University and Edward Cope, who had informal ties with several institutions.
While neither Marsh nor Cope made any of their finds in Utah, the fossil rush encouraged others to search the state. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, hungry for large specimens to fill his museum in Pittsburgh, sent crews to eastern Utah.
The philanthropist wanted dinosaur skeletons in his Carnegie Museum to rival those of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Yale's Peabody Museum in New Haven, Conn.
Work began in rocky outcrops near Vernal in 1909, where Earl Douglass found skeletons of giant creatures such as Apatosaurus and Camarasaurus. Most of Utah's early paleontology work focused on this area. In the mid-1920s, the last major skeletons were hauled away from the quarry that is now part of Dinosaur National Monument.
Driven by public fascination, those pioneering paleontologists focused on trying to find as many of these ancient beasts as possible and then figuring out what they were.
"In its heyday, 'the goal" was hunting for dinosaurs and the glory of naming the dinosaur," said Lindsay Zanno, a University of Utah graduate student who studies paleontology.
While the public still thrills to the latest individual dinosaur discoveries, paleontologists today angle for a larger look at the ancient world. Clues about how the specimens lived are as important as the fossils themselves.
"Someone could bring me the most complete T-rex ever found, but if I don't know where it comes from, the specimen is all but useless," explained Scott Sampson, a paleontologist with the Utah Museum of Natural History. "Now we try to not just collect the dinosaur, but parts of every animal, every plant we can get our hands on."
Hot house dinosaurs
The fossils of plants and smaller animals that earlier paleontologists ignored have become key pieces in reconstructing ancient ecosystems that existed when Earth was a hothouse planet with no polar ice caps.
"The data that's coming out is intriguing and important and tells us something about the world of dinosaurs we didn't know before," he said. "Ultimately, 'it" may tell us something about our world."
Understanding how ancient Earth reacted to global warming could provide valuable lessons for today's environmental challenges.
Remnants of an interior sea covered parts of Utah during a stretch of the Cretaceous era, which Sampson and others are studying. Much work at Grand Staircase focuses on the Kaiparowits formation, outcrops formed about 74-76 million years ago. The terrain likely resembled today's Mississippi River delta region.
This type of tropical climate, coupled with what was then flat terrain, provided ideal circumstances for preserving creatures. As storms moved through the area, they washed sand and mud across flood plains to quickly cover up freshly killed dinosaurs, Zanno said.
Geological processes then conspired to allow these fossilized treasures to be exposed today, said state paleontologist James Kirkland.
About 15 million years ago, after the Colorado Plateau rose, wind and rain began to create the famous rock formations of southern Utah. Chances are the same erosional processes that have exposed recent finds have also destroyed other specimens before paleontologists began exploring Grand Staircase.
"If we don't excavate these things," Kirkland said, "they're lost forever."
Monsoon paleontology
Southern Utah's seasonal heavy rains, winds and terrain make for good fossil hunting. Western Washington state's temperate forests help prevent erosion that would expose bones. Parts of Arizona receive too little rainfall to bring new fossils to light quickly.
What makes Grand Staircase a virtually untouched paleo time capsule is its ruggedness - which turns out to be a gift and a curse.
In one sense, the difficulty of getting around the formations has for decades kept people away, which means they couldn't disturb the fossils.
But that remoteness also means crews must camp for weeks and hike deep into the monument to reach dig sites.
"If it was easy, it would have been done a long time ago," Sampson said. "The fact that it's difficult makes it more exciting for us today, because every single dinosaur we can identify is new to science."
And with few roads, it's hard to haul out larger finds. So each September, the Bureau of Land Management provides a helicopter to fly out the largest pieces and drop supplies to establish base camps in the region's most remote corners.
Even the accessible sites can be tough to reach. Kirkland is studying several sites in the Wahweap formation, a type of rock dating to 78-80 million years ago during the Cretaceous era. His crew drives seven hours from Salt Lake City to reach base camp in the southern part of Grand Staircase.
Kirkland doesn't know if his agency, the Utah Geological Survey, has the money to maintain these sites. So he's talking to the Discovery Channel, which could offer some funding in exchange for rights to document the work.
Adding to his dilemma is the recent discovery of a new dinosaur quarry near Green River. The site, first opened this month, could fill a gap in the paleontological record of North American land life from the early Cretaceous era. If the dates are confirmed, all the creatures found there would be new to science.
Once again, Kirkland finds himself fighting for limited outside resources.
Institutions such as the U. have better access to National Science Foundation funding, a source that often prefers projects involving students. But national funding, from government and other sources, is tight.
Coming to dinosaur country
Meantime, wealthy private institutions are conducting their own searches in Utah.
One is Yale's Peabody Museum, which has been sending crews here for several years, said collections manager Walter Joyce.
Joyce's team has been scouring parts of Utah that contain rocks from the Triassic era, 206-248 million years ago, when many modern groups of animals first appeared. The team has uncovered a crocodile-like creature that walked on two legs, likely a new non-dinosaur species that has yet to be fully described.
While the rock Joyce is searching contains fewer fossils than the Kaiparowits and the Wahweap formations, the payoff can be huge.
"If you find something," he said, "it's going to be spectacular."
Titus, Grand Staircase's paleontologist, sees the infinite promise of working in a place where the next big discovery may be just beyond the next outcropping. So far, researchers have walked through only 40,000 of a half-a-million acres of exposed rock, but they've already found about 10 potentially new species.
"We're just starting to get a handle on what's out there. We really do feel like this is a frontier of paleontology still," Titus said. "The next couple decades will be some of the most exciting in paleontology in this part of the world."
glavine@sltrib.com
