Vernal, Utah

Vernal sits at the edge of one of the richest fossil beds in the world. The town was settled in the late eighteen seventies in Ashley Valley, a valley named for William Henry Ashley, the fur trader. It was later renamed Vernal, a word meaning springlike, chosen to suggest growth and optimism.

Dinosaur National Monument lies roughly twenty miles to the east, where the Carnegie Museum began excavating a massive bone deposit in nineteen nine. Vernal became the supply point and later the tourism hub for that dig. The Utah Field House of Natural History downtown has displayed the valley's paleontology since nineteen forty-eight. Oil and gas development in the Uintah Basin added another boom layer to the town's economy in the twentieth century, and Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch once used the surrounding canyon country as a hideout.