Dinosaur National Monument

Good morning, my friends. I have a little time left before we need to be on our way, and so I'll spend the last of our time here in Vernal chatting with you about the national monument. Oh my goodness. So much to see, and we only saw a fraction of the park, as you'll see in just a minute. I have a lot of pictures for you, so you might want to fill your cup with whatever you're drinking, and then we'll get started. Go ahead. I'll wait.

As we reached the far side of town, we drove past this iconic Vernal dinosaur. This is Dinah the Pink Dinosaur. You can read more about her at that link I've given you. I remembered her from our last visit here.

The entrance to the park was a few miles down the road. When we turned off we drove just a little farther to reach the park.

There was a dinosaur to greet us.

We were approaching the Quarry Visitor Center. I was able to pick up a refrigerator magnet there, and we learned some interesting facts about the place. I'm afraid this post is going to feature a lot of signs since my images require some explanation. I always figure you can read them as well as I can.

Just outside the doors to the visitor center is this life-size replica of a stegosaurus.

This is exciting, I know, but please mind your manners.

The stegosaurus was featured at the New York World's Fair in 1964-65.

Here's a little information about the original inhabitants of this area.

We're told this is the best example of the rock layers through the ages.

This next sign shows all 23 layers. It's a little hard to read, but I think you can get the idea. Remember you can make an image larger by clicking on it. (If you're reading via email, you'll need to click on the title to the post to be taken to the actual blog. There, you can click on the image to make it larger.)

There was a large 3-D relief map taking up a good portion of the room. The image below only shows half of it. I wanted you to see how this large national monument spans two states: Utah and Colorado. We'd wanted to take the Harper's Corner Road Scenic Drive, which is shown on the lower right.

It would have meant leaving the park and driving on farther to Dinosaur, Colorado, where we could enter the park at a different spot. Then, the scenic drive itself was 31 miles one way. Adding it all up, we realized we were going to need to drive over 100 miles before we could return to Vernal, and so we decided to save that for a future trip...probably our Eclipse 2024 Trip next year. 

Moving on, we took in a few more of the informational signs...

After that, we hopped on a shuttle that took us to the Quarry Exhibit Hall. It was the one other thing we wanted to see during this visit.

The shuttles run about every 15 minutes, and this was well worth the short wait to see it. Here's a picture of the exhibit hall. It is two stories, and our tour started on the second floor.

But before I take you inside, I want you to come along as we take a different scenic drive...this one:

We're starting here because near the end of the drive, you'll see an explanation for how so many dinosaur bones ended up there at the Quarry Exhibit Hall.

But first...some petroglyphs and pictographs. Here's what our tour book said about this. The name of the place was "Swelter Shelter," and there's a story behind the name.

Approaching the shelter, we read this sign.

This next sign discusses how they were carved or painted.

And here are some good examples of pictographs. You can see some of the ones on the top right still have the red coloring used when they were originally created.

Here are some more on a different rock face.

These were carved into the rock face, and so these are petroglyphs.

Moving on, we had some pretty views of the Green River.

Looking in the opposite direction, you can see how the river has split the dome of the mountain in half here. This is the area identified as "Split Mountain Canyon."

Looking straight ahead, there was a primitive campground below. There was also a boat launch here.

The guide book mentioned these ants. It's hard to see the ants without being able to see their movement. This ant hill was about three feet in diameter.

Here's what our tour book told us about them. Indeed, you can see the husks of seeds all around the opening.

We drove through the campground where I could get a different view of the colors in the canyon.

There's a private ranch out here. The sign explains the image that follows.

From where we were standing, this is what we could see:

Finally, this next portion of the tour book explains the image that follows, but it also explains what you're going to see when we tour the Quarry Exhibit Hall.

Here you can see the bands of color described above. What I really wanted you to understand was the last part about what caused the die-off and how so many different kinds of bones ended up all piled together like a bone log-jam.

One last stop...this is Turtle Rock. Can you see the turtle's head at the upper middle of the image?

Okay, so let's return to the Quarry Exhibit Hall. That's Mike in the blue hat.

Inside was nothing short of fascinating. It's a rock wall two stories high embedded with more than 1,500 specimens. In the image below, you can see the vertebrae from a single animal.

Here are more bones. Looking at the middle and near the top, you can see two femur bones from two different animals. 

Below is a zoomed in shot of the same two femurs. The larger heavier one is from an apatosaurus. The one to its left and a little lower is from a diplodocus. The ranger likened it to finding femurs from, say, an elephant and a giraffe. Both are large animals, but the elephant would be heavier with a heavier frame to support his body.

Imagine being Earl Douglass and discovering all of this. It was actually his idea to keep this portion of the wall intact for educational purposes. 

More informational signs to follow.

Here are some more images of the wall. At the top of the image below, you can see a rib cage.

This was a model of a femur. I had Mike stand there for scale. (He's already geared up for next year's eclipse trip.)

Need help identifying it?

Here are the partial toes of the allosaurus.

There were also smaller exhibits containing fossilized remains. The one below is a salamander.

This next one is a tiny frog. The main part of the body on the right would fit inside a quarter.

Here's a little more information about Allosaurus.

And here he is all put together.

This next image shows a neck vertebra as if you were looking straight down into a drinking glass You can see the oval shape of it.

And check out these benches created in the shape of a femur.

We saw a few blooming things...repeats of things I've already shown you. When we crossed into Utah, we started seeing our old friend the blooming Rabbitbrush.

This can be seen all over the west.

Okay, so that was our tour. We'll have to check back again and take the other scenic drive we missed this time around. We still needed to do some grocery shopping, and then we just hung out at the RV for the rest of the afternoon. I took the first stitches on the new "Kittens" project.

The pattern will take some getting used to. The stitch and the color are indicated by symbols rather than words or numbers, and so it means referring to the pattern frequently. It is stitched with three strands of floss, rather than the two I'm used to. Also, I've backed it with muslin since I was unable to iron over the stamped design. All of that makes it just slightly more difficult to pull the needle through the fabric. Even though the difference is "slight," it still had my broken thumb complaining toward the end. It might actually be good therapy for my thumb.

Today's drive will be around 300 miles. We'll be in Taylor Park Reservoir in Colorado when we reach our final destination. As I've mentioned, I'm not expecting to have internet access there. Possibly, the cell service has improved in the four years since our last visit, but I'm not expecting that either. If I'm unable to post, just know we'll be back in civilization when we head back to Moab next Monday. If you don't hear from me sooner, then it will be no later than a week from tomorrow when I return. I'll take lots of pictures and we'll do some time traveling.

Mike just now handed me a frozen breakfast burrito. He did the cooking this morning. The man knows how to operate a microwave oven like a champ. Time for us to be packing up and moving on down the dusty trail.