Dinosaur National Monument

You are at Dinosaur National Monument, where the deep past is quite literally written into the rock. In nineteen oh nine, a paleontologist named Earl Douglass, working for the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh, came hunting for old bones in these badlands. He found a row of eight tailbones poking from a sandstone ridge, and that single discovery opened one of the richest dinosaur graveyards ever uncovered.

Over the next fourteen years, crews shipped hundreds of tons of fossils east to Pittsburgh, enough to mount a number of complete skeletons. President Woodrow Wilson set the original monument aside in nineteen fifteen to protect the quarry. President Franklin Roosevelt later expanded it to more than two hundred thousand acres, reaching across the Colorado and Utah line.

Today a glass-walled hall still encloses the cliff face, hundreds of bones left exactly where they died, in stone laid down in the late Jurassic.