Well-traveled paleontologist enjoys his time in Utah

PASADENA, Calif. — Scott Sampson's career has taken him from Vancouver, B.C., to New York to Salt Lake City to San Francisco — with stops along the way in Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Madagascar and Mexico.

He counts his stay in Utah among his best, so much so that he's never really left. The former chief curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History remains a research curator at the Utah museum and adjunct professor in the University of Utah's department of geology and geophysics.

"It's the ultimate job for a dinosaur paleontologist because you get to be at a natural history museum and have graduate students in a geology department — and you have Utah as your backyard," Sampson said. "I mean, I was five hours away from some of the best dinosaur hunting in the world. And so it was super for that. I really, really enjoyed my time there.

"I still enjoy my time there. I'm still running a major research project in southern Utah, digging up dinosaurs in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. We found on the order of a dozen new dinosaurs in the last decade — just amazing creatures. And we're just starting to name those and present those to the world."

His enthusiasm about the project is palpable.

"Grand Staircase is one of the last great unexplored areas in the lower 48 states. And maybe the last great dinosaur boneyard in the United States," Sampson said. "There's only a handful of roads that go through it. It's really rugged. And so we've been out there hiking miles and miles and miles with plaster and burlap and tools and sometimes using helicopters to lift (the fossils) out.

"But what's coming out is this entirely new assemblage of dinosaur species that's changing how we look at the world of dinosaurs."

And Utahns will have a chance to see them in the new Utah Museum of Natural History, which is scheduled for completion in 2011.

"In fact, the new Utah Museum of Natural History will feature many of these new dinosaurs that we found."

The new museum will offer a lot more room for dinosaur exhibits.

"We're going to be putting in a number of skeletons and skulls of some of these weird things we've found," Sampson said. "I mean, there's horned dinosaurs with skulls that are close to 8 feet long and things with spikes coming out of their heads — all brand new that people haven't seen before."

e-mail: pierce@desnews.com