Dinosaur-fossil museum sought near Moab

The state paleontologist would like to see a museum and park near Moab to show off a unique resource: the Cedar Mountain formation, where a slew of dinosaur fossils are being uncovered.

The Dalton Well site is on state land, and the proposed facility would be a state park. The paleontologist, Jim Kirkland, concedes that lately state parks have been taking a beating in the budget.

But a museum at Dalton Well would be a great addition to the Moab area, he says, and it would highlight an important scientific resource.

Of dinosaur quarries in the early part of the Cedar Mountain formation, Kirkland says the Dalton Well site is the biggest. "It probably goes half a mile," he said.

This isn't the first time a museum has been proposed for Dalton Well. Earlier, Moab officials worked on a feasibility study, but the plans fell through. The visitors center would have cost $15 million, Kirkland says, and that was too much.

But he said a scaled-down version would let visitors look through spotting telescopes at excavations going on in a dinosaur quarry on a nearby cliff. He said its displays would explain the surprising discoveries made there and elsewhere in the Cedar Mountain formation.

The formation loops through a section of east-central Utah from south of Emery, along the San Rafael Swell near Ferron and Castle Dale. It reaches its northernmost exposure a bit southeast of Price, then dips toward Moab.

Dating to between 98.5 million and 124 million years ago, the Cedar Mountain formation fills a gap in knowledge about animals from the early Cretaceous era.

Researchers from Brigham Young University in Provo have worked on and off at Dalton Well since the 1970s, Kirkland said. It is of great scientific importance, he added.

"I just think it's an incredible asset to Moab," he said. "There's 100 years of work to be done there."

For most of the United States, few remains date to the period.

But this formation, about 300 or 400 feet thick at the most, preserves a menagerie of fossil animals from the era. "It represents about 30 million years," he said.

A great deal was happening then. American dinosaurs of the early Cretaceous resemble their counterparts in Europe probably because there was a land connection to Europe.

"But then sea levels rose and North America became isolated," he said. It was an island continent, like Australia, for 15 million to 20 million years, and dinosaurs developed differently from those elsewhere.

Suddenly, in the late Cretaceous period, a land bridge formed in Alaska and dinosaurs from Asia migrated into what is now the United States, he said.