Dinosaur curatorial center planned in Vernal

Dinosaur National Monument officials want to build a $7.2 million research and curatorial center in Vernal.

The 20,300-square-foot Uintah Research and Curatorial Center would serve as an addition to the Utah Field House of Natural History Museum, the state's new dinosaur museum on Vernal's Main Street. It would serve both the monument and the state museum.

It is intended as a home for fossils, prehistoric and historic artifacts, a library, a laboratory and records. Currently, approximately 400,000 fossil specimens and even more pages of records are housed at a dozen locations in the national monument, particularly at the Quarry Visitor Center.

The visitor center has been a major tourism draw for the Vernal area, featuring displays and a sandstone wall that is embedded with dinosaur fossils. Hundreds of thousands of visitors annually have toured the center.

The Quarry Visitor Center 9 miles north of Jensen is the only place to view fossils in Dinosaur National Monument, which sprawls through sections of Utah and Colorado. On July 13, the center was closed as unsafe. Built in 1957 on unstable soil, the structure has been falling apart because of the shifting ground.

Still, the research and curatorial facility is not intended to replace the visitor center.

"The Uintah facility in Vernal was for curation of our paleontological collection. The visitor center was a separate project," said Wayne Prokopetz, the monument's chief of research and resource management.

"We still want to have our visitor center rebuilt."

When that will happen and how much the reconstruction will cost are open questions. The National Park Service is evaluating the situation and examining alternatives. "So it's going to be three to six months before we have some firmed-up plans and costs," Prokopetz said Sunday in a telephone interview.

Meanwhile, plans are progressing for the research center.

According to an environmental assessment, it would be built on land to be donated to the federal government by the city of Vernal and Uintah County. Attached to the Field House, it would "allow the (monument's) museum collection to be properly processed, catalogued and stored according to the NPS museum standards," it says.

It would serve both the national monument and the Field House Museum. Although the research center "will not be a publicly open facility," according to the assessment, Prokopetz said visitors will be able to look into the fossil preparation lab and ask questions.

"It's planned to have a large window, so visitors could watch people prepare fossil specimens" in the research and curatorial center, he said. "We're hoping to have that interactive."