Rest of dinosaur going to U. museum

Most of the remaining bones of a hadrosaur (duckbill dinosaur) whose skull is on display at the Utah Museum of Natural History will be airlifted and trucked to the museum starting Wednesday.

It is one of the best dinosaur skeletons ever discovered in southern Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Counting the skull, the hadrosaur is estimated 70 percent complete. Also found were sections of what the Bureau of Land Management calls "very well-preserved skin impressions around the hips and tail."

The fossils will be picked up from a site discovered in 2001 by Jodi Vincent, a museum volunteer who was on a survey of new fossil localities in the monument.

Preparation by museum paleontologists is expected to take one or two years, after which the rest of the skeleton also will be displayed.