Millions of years ago, dinosaurs rumbled across the landscape of what is now Utah. Thousands of remnants of this prehistoric era are carefully preserved and interpreted in sites, museums, and quarries across the state, awaiting your discovery. Below is a sampling of dinosaur-related attractions.
Exhibited in Ogden’s Historic Union Station is one of the oldest dinosaur eggs in the world, estimated to be 120 million years old. The egg was discovered in China and later donated to Union Station’s Gem and Mineral Museum. This museum also includes several dinosaur bones, tracks, and eggs of North American origin.
The Eccles Dinosaur Park on the Ogden River Parkway has over 100 exhibits with more than sixty life size and near life size dinosaurs. These replicas depict prehistoric crawlers, dinosaurs, marine creatures, and flying reptiles dating from the late Triassic through the Jurassic and Cretaceous eras.
Thanksgiving Point is home to the world’s largest dinosaur museum, the North American Museum of Ancient Life. With more than 60 mounted dinosaur skeletons and thousands of ancient fossils, the museum showcases the various prehistoric eras, and offers hands-on learning activities.
The Brigham Young University Earth Science Museum in Provo is recognized world-wide for having one of the largest , and most valuable Jurassic dinosaur collections. Displays include: fossils from two of the largest dinosaurs in the world, and one of the smallest; a 150-million year old dinosaur egg displayed with an x-ray of the embryo within; two fully mounted dinosaur skeletons; skulls of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops; dinosaur skin fossils, and a new mineral collection.
The Fairview Museum of History and Art is a unique small community museum with outstanding exhibits including a newly installed, life-size replica of a Colombian Mammoth. This mammoth was discovered in the nearby mountains during a construction project in the summer of 1988. The skeletal remains were preserved in a peat bog where it died eleven thousand years ago.
Twenty miles east of Vernal, near Jensen, the Quarry Visitor Center of Dinosaur National Monument is a dramatic time capsule preserved in an ancient river sandbar. Here, the fossilized remains of over 2,000 bones have been exposed in a 200-foot-long wall, now enclosed as a permanent exhibit.
Beyond the Quarry, Dinosaur National Monument offers trails, tours and activities which highlight the area’s unique geology, history, wildlife and rugged beauty.
At the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park and Dinosaur Gardens in Vernal, visitors stroll through time--historic, prehistoric and geologic. Exhibits of rock types, and vertebrate and invertebrate fossils fill the Geology Hall. Paintings and murals by Ernest Untermann, an innovative artist and geologist, depict prehistoric scenes and modern vistas.
In the Dinosaur Gardens, Mesozoic creatures dominate. The display of 14 life-sized extinct animals was created by sculptor, Elbert Porter. A small lake and waterfall tumbling across native rock with foliage reminiscent of the Mesozoic era enhance the illusion.
Between 65 and 200 million years ago, dinosaurs roamed through Eastern Utah. They left behind their bones, footprints, and other traces of their existence. The College of Eastern Utah (CEU) Prehistoric Museum in Price showcases this ancient past. The museum has six complete skeletons from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, three of which are real bone specimens. The collection also contains many dinosaur tracks removed from local coal mines, dinosaur eggs, and other fossils. The CEU Prehistoric Museum currently operates ten active dinosaur fossil quarries.
Located on the northern rim of Utah’s San Rafael Swell, 35 miles south of Price, the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, which was discovered in the 1880s by area ranchers, is the only quarry of its kind in the world. It was formed in the Jurassic Period, about 147 million years ago, when unsuspecting dinosaurs walked into a muddy bog and became trapped. Their remains form a jumble of fossilized bones.
Since 1928, over 12,000 bones have been removed from the quarry. It has produced 44 complete Allosaurus specimens, which almost single handedly ensured Allosaurus’ selection as the Utah State Fossil.
In Castle Dale, the Museum of the San Rafael tells the stories of a primitive past long buried under shifting soils. A replica of a fossilized dinosaur egg believed to contain an embryo is part of the collection, as well as skeletons of Allosaurus, Chasmosaurus, Albertosaurus, and the great skull of Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The Dinosaur Museum of Blanding features realistic, life sized dinosaur sculptures, skeletons, paintings, and fossil displays. Enter through the jaws of a Tyrannosaurus to see exhibits of creatures, which existed even before the age of the dinosaurs, and stand beneath a giant, fossilized tree upright for the first time in 275 million years.
The museum also contains a “History Hall of Hollywood Dinosaur Movies” with movie memorabilia from the silent classics all the way through the high tech dinosaurs of today’s cinema. Palaeontology exhibits complete the collection including dinosaur eggs, and fossilized dinosaur skin.
