The St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site is starting a new dig in an area where dinosaur bones were previously found, and experts hope it will reveal new insights into the state’s Jurassic-era history.
Across the street from the Dinosaur Discovery Site museum, the dig crew has already begun to open a new fossil quarry. So far, they have discovered a fish fossil and several fossil tracks, or footprints, in the layers of rock under the dirt. While it’s difficult to predict what else will be unearthed, the museum currently houses dinosaur bones found in this area, and the crew has high hopes they will find more.
“The potential for making new discoveries in these layers is very high,” said Andrew Milner, St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site chief paleontologist and curator. “Finding remains of a new kind of dinosaur in these rocks would be a dream come true and really flesh out what we know about the early stages of dinosaur evolution.”
Paleontologists at the site are being joined by other professionals from other areas of Utah, Idaho, Colorado and Texas. Milner describes the dig as an “‘all hands on deck’ situation” because the city plans to build a new electrical substation in May that will overlap with the bone-bearing layers of the site.
“Part of what we’re expecting is to find — scientifically significant discoveries, and hopefully the discovery of new animals, either fish or possibly even a new dinosaur that we get to describe and will kind of be a highlight for St. George,” said Diana Call, executive director of St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site. “It’ll be interesting whether we find a whole dinosaur or not, but we know we’ll likely find new species of fish, sharks, possibly even plants.”
The fossils recovered in the area are from about 200 million years ago, in the early Jurassic period, when the land used to be covered by a body of water known as Lake Whitmore. The fossils are found in a set of layers of rock that geologists call the Moenave Formation, and the bones found there are some of the oldest known in North America.
To speed up the process on the new excavation site, the dig is inviting those in the community with access to heaving digging equipment or who are certified to operate equipment like a backhoe or front-end loader to volunteer at the site. Those interested in helping with the dig or donating resources are invited to contact the dinosaur discovery site at 435-590-4190.
The St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site is a world-renowned museum and fossil site with one of the largest collections of dinosaur trackways and swim tracks. The site is built on the property where the fossils were originally found in 2000, when a local optometrist was leveling out a hill on his land and found detailed footprints and natural casts of dinosaur feet in the sandstone beneath. The site is best known for settling the debate among paleontologists on whether dinosaurs swam, because of a number of fossils with swim tracks that show claw marks left by dinosaurs whose feet could not touch the ground while swimming and left claw marks in the clay.
“The importance of the SGDS cannot be understated,” said state paleontologist Jim Kirkland, of the Utah Geological Survey. “Its fossils tell a story unique in the prehistory of the American Southwest, and they are pivotal in understanding the beginning of the ‘age of dinosaurs.'”
The St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site is located at 2180 E. Riverside Drive in St. George and is open every day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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