USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum: Price's Dinosaur Hall

Price, Utah, sits in the heart of Carbon County, a coal-mining region that has also yielded some of the finest dinosaur fossils in the American West. Utah State University Eastern's Prehistoric Museum, which traces its origins to a community museum founded in nineteen sixty-one, houses one of the most significant collections of Cretaceous and Jurassic dinosaur material in the country. The museum's prize exhibits include a nearly complete Utahraptor skeleton, the largest raptor ever found, and extensive material from the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry about thirty miles to the south, one of the densest concentrations of Jurassic dinosaur bones ever discovered.

The quarry has produced over sixteen thousand bones. Price is also a coal town with a labor history stretching back to the late eighteen hundreds, and the museum connects both stories: the prehistoric one locked in stone, the industrial one played out over the last century in the mines beneath the same desert.