Tracking Dinosaurs in Utah - Grandparents.com

Once you see Utah's open spaces, you get it. So that's where the dinosaurs roamed; no wonder, it's so vast.

If dinos are what you and the grandkids seek, there are plenty of places to find them in Utah, whether as reconstructed museum models or fossilized bones out in the wild. Archaeological digs have yielded tons of skeletal remains. In fact, the most prolific fossil site in the world is here.

Why not bone up on the fossil record, get a full-scale, lifelike view, then wind your way to where those creatures once lumbered?

Dinos on Display

Photo by J.S. Fletcher

Thanksgiving Point at Lehi, near Provo, is home to the world's largest dinosaur museum: the North American Museum of Ancient Life. More dinosaur skeletons are on display there than anywhere else in the world.

Hands-on activities include fossil rubbings, Design-a-Dino, and an Erosion Table for burying and uncovering model dinosaurs. The museum runs special family programs Monday nights, and lets brave, budding paleontologists slumber with the raptors as part of its DinoSnore sleepovers. In the Fossil Lab, older children can observe working paleontologists, who happily answer questions about life in the field and in the museum.

Photo courtesy of College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum. Photo by Christine K. Trease

Another spot for viewing cleaned and reassembled dinosaur bones is the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum in Price. From a second-floor balcony you can look down into the dinosaur pit where skeletal models are posed in the midst of a kill.

Photo by Jason Brunner

A favorite hangout for Maggie Favero and 4-year-old grandson, Logan Cooper, is the George S. Eccles Dinosaur Park on Ogden River Parkway. More than 100 full-size dinosaurs fill the park; kids crawl all over those in the playground. The replicas depict crawlers, dinosaurs, marine creatures, and flying reptiles dating from the late Triassic through the Jurassic and Cretaceous eras. Robotics and a sound system add to the life-like illusion.

Not to worry. "Grandma, we don't have to be scared, the dinosaurs are just pretend," proclaimed young Logan.

"The wonderful thing about children — why I think they love dinosaurs — is it's an unknown commodity," said his grandmother, a retired teacher. "They will never see a live dinosaur. I think it's the love of the unknown. I think they also are fascinated about animals of that size."

Logan had this insight into one of the biggest and baddest: "I don't think T-Rex is mean. I just don't think he had a friend to play with."

Photo by Fletcher/Newbern

Mike Leschin of the Bureau of Land Management leads visitors at the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry.

Wanna walk where the dinos walked and see remains where they actually perished? Make your way down a bumpy gravel road to the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry 30 miles south of Price.

Because of its location in the San Rafael Swell, a large geologic upheaval of a type found nowhere else on Earth, this quarry is the mother lode of dino bones. More than 12,000 have been found there and archaeologists are still working on the jumble of petrified remains. Visitors are allowed inside a building that protects an exposed dinosaur bone bed from vandals and weather.

One of the most popular dinos in those parts was the Allosaurus. This two-ton, meat-eater measured as long as 35 feet. Imagine gnarly, serrated teeth and three-fingered hands sporting six-inch-long claws for tearing apart flesh. During the Jurassic period 147 million years ago, the quarry was a popular prehistoric hangout for Allosaurus and others, like the carnivorous Ceratosaurus, the plant-eating Camptosaurus, and the long-necked, veggie-loving Camarasaurus.

Photo courtesy of Emery County Travel Bureau

In the neighborhood are two good examples of dinosaur footprints in the wild. You'll need directions to Cottonwood Wash/Buckhorn Wash and the Moore Cutoff, or a guide to find them.

Fossil hounds, dino hunters and adventurous grandparents should contact Mike McCandless of Emery County Economic Development for first-hand tips. This guy spotted a sea fossil for us, some few million years old, out in an open field and has routinely found dino footprints and fossils on local lands.

Photo courtesy of Utah State Parks

Fremont Indian State Park Museum

McCandless can also direct you to prime sites for viewing Indian rock art: the nearby Buckhorn Draw Pictograph site, with its mysterious figures painted more than 2,000 years ago; and, up the road, Fremont Indian State Park Museum in Sevier at Clear Creek Canyon. Ask McCandless about the rock graffiti left by a member of Butch and Sundance's Hole in the Wall gang.

Photo courtesy of Emery County Travel Bureau

One of the kid-friendliest dino experts around must be Don Lessem, the columnist "Dino Don" in Highlights for Children Magazine. He actually owns dinosaurs — well, skeletal remains — and regularly exhibits them all over the world.

He offers this great travel advice: "One tip for the long car rides across the West. I told my bickering kids they could open their mouths as soon as they saw a house. It was five hours before we heard a peep."

Utah seems to go on forever. During your visit, perhaps standing on a rock ridge or even from your car window, let your imagination take over as you look out to nowhere in all directions and think what it must have been like when the dinosaurs roamed here.