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VERNAL, Utah — Local legend has it that cowboys, sheep herders and trappers long knew about the huge fossilized bones that regularly surfaced from the ancient rock underlying Utah's dinosaur country.
But not until steel magnate Andrew Carnegie learned of the bones did Vernal and the surrounding Ashley Valley get the nation's attention 100 years ago. Now Vernal, a Western outpost whose wide streets are lined with energy, mining and agricultural businesses, makes a business of its bones. It's home to a large dinosaur museum and is the base for a National Park Service site at a bone quarry Carnegie established in 1909.
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The park has a temporary visitors center with fossils and a gift shop featuring giant replica dinosaur bones to take home.
And there is a lot more at the park than bones. Fremont Indians who lived near the park's two rivers about 1,000 years ago left behind both petroglyphs (patterns that are chipped or carved into the rock) and pictographs (drawings or paintings on the rock). They can be seen at remote sites accessible by foot or car.
The park is also spectacular in itself, a rolling bed of multicolored rock cliffs and formations showing the movement of the earth over hundreds of millions of years.
"The cliffs and sculptured forms are sometimes smooth, sometimes fantastically craggy, always massive, and they have a peculiar capacity to excite the imagination," wrote author Wallace Stegner in a book of essays, "Dinosaur," that Stegner edited in 1955 when there was talk of converting the park's Yampa and Green canyons into a reservoir for a hydroelectric dam. "The effect on the human spirit is neither numbing nor awesome, but infinitely peaceful," wrote Stegner.
Dinosaur bones are found on every continent. But Uinta Basin is unique because of the way that the rock shows the ancient remains. Originally the rocks, formed from lake and floodplain sediment, lay flat. Over millions of years, the movement of the earth pushed the massive stone layers until they now point at the sky. Erosion has worn away the rock, revealing the bones.
The result: "There's just no other place anywhere on the planet where they're just so beautifully exposed for the public to see. It's the most famous place to see dinosaurs still in their host rock anywhere in the world," said Jim Kirkland, the Utah state paleontologist, who works for the Utah Geological Survey. "There is no place as spectacular as Dinosaur."
The valley holds lesser-known attractions. Settlers entered in the late 1800s, many of them members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in search of a place where they could practice their religion free from persecution.
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Last edited by Baack; 09.21.2009 at 06.41 PM..
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09.21.2009
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