Finding Dinosaur Fossils In Rock

Join geology professor Shawn Willsey as he explores dinosaur fossils embedded in rock at Dinosaur National Monument in northeastern Utah.
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Shawn Willsey
College of Southern Idaho
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Twin Falls, ID 83303

[@shawnwillsey]

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[@seeratlasdtyria4584]

Grew up round here, (I'm OLD), There's a LOT of bones around there, when I was a kid we used to come across them out hunting Jack Rabbits and coyotes. Besides the Monument itself, don't know if they still allow it, but we used to 'float' the Green River thru there, dangerous as hell, but amazing fishing:) My Great Grand dad, and my Grandpa had ranches round there.

[@Tom37323]

In 1990 I took my family to the dinosaur monument building. I'm glad that they have kept the place up, it is quite the experience. Thanks for the "walk down memory lane".

[@marionnadeau8457]

Thanks, Shawn! Dinosaur NM is one of my favorite places, especially to take people who visit from other parts of the U.S. Being able to touch the big bones in the wall in the quarry building is a really special experience!

[@zweispurmopped]

Now that's one for the bucket list! 🤩

[@LizWCraftAdd1ct]

Absolutely fascinating Shawn, thank you.

[@kevindorland738]

Thank you Professor

[@SkepticalRaptor]

You say you’re not a paleontologist, but I have to think that a good paleontologist is also a good geologist.

[@bagoquarks]

In 1961 my brother and I were 15 and 10, respectively, when we stopped here on a drive from CA to MO to visit my father's family. I-70 and I-80 weren't quite ready yet so we were taking US40 East when I found this national monument nearby on a gas station road map. (The latter were given away free in the station lobbies to encourage drivers to "stick with the brand" on long trips.) Somehow I convinced my dad to make a stop. Thanks to you I can say I like what they've done with the place in the past 60+ years.

[@Splusmer]

For me it’s almost exactly 50 years since my family visited. I don’t remember accessing two levels (specifically the lower level), but I was still pretty young. We came up with dinosaur names for each family member, but I only remember mine (Scottasaurus Rex) and my youngest sister’s (Creepasaurus Babyrontus).

[@cjay2]

Thank you for making this informative video.

[@3xHermes]

Great location, Great Video!! Thank you so much!! More Dinosaurs!! 🦴🦖

[@douglasdunn7267]

Thanks so much Shawn!!! Your presentations are great, I always look forward to them. The show you did with Nick Zentner was super also, really enjoyed your input to his teachings. I've been following you and Nick for some years now, love to see them. Take care!

[@cdineaglecollapsecenter4672]

Thanks for the video. I love Dinosaur National Monument, the Quarry is amazing and there is also a ton of other great geological features there.

[@justanotherchad9554]

We were at Lake Powell when I was a kid and found a sizable section of some kind of large vertebrae sticking out of the sandstone. What sorts of extinct animals were found there?

[@ThomasEckhardt]

Thanks Shawn for branching out into paleontology, this is indeed a fascinating place! One of my othered favored sites is the Fossil Point, a few miles south of Green River Utah ( not Wyoming!). It is basically undeveloped, no trails and one has to search for the bones (primarily of a couple of allosaurus) just like a dinosaur hunter. Took me three tries to find them, but some are breathtaking in size and color! It’s a great place for kids to explore and do some detective work to find them. A few years ago they put up a sign at the turnoff and even a parking sign, finding the location is easier. Another great place is the Berlin-Ichthyosaur museum in the Nevada state park of the same name. The place is remote and open only on weekends mainly in the hot summer season. Geologically unique is the juxtaposition of gold mines and this fossil site. According to a retired miner I met at the site, the paleontologists became aware of this sites because miners used the large ichthyosaur vertebrae as doorstops in their cabins, well at least a nice story…

[@causewaykayak]

Absolutely rivetting. Great place for families to show the youngsters some science and some conservation too 🏆

[@ageranger1541]

Very good episode thank you for posting. I think I should get collage credit for watching all your videos 😊

[@marymachunis3778]

This is so fascinating! Seeing fossils embedded in the rock is amazing.

[@stevew5212]

Kool stuff. Thanks for taking us there to see that.

[@susiesue3141]

Great video! Thanks for sharing! 😊

[@rrjmdPA]

don't know what camera you're using but the FPS and gating isn't fast enough to keep up with the speed of your pans, trucks and tilts. Wow, hard on the eyes.

[@rubenskiii]

Thanks for showing us this amazing place! It's so weird to see them like that, i mean i know they come from the rocks but seeing them like that for some reason makes you understand so much better they where normal living animals one day longggg ago. Almost looks like a modern day riverbank you'd go looking for deer skulls. Mind-boggling it's the same thing but then preserved through an unfathomable amount of time. Makes you wonder if 150 million years from now someone or something is gonna look at fossilized deer skulls in an ancient riverbed and wonder what they looked like in the flesh.

[@Dragrath1]

Sometimes organic molecules particularly durable one like collagen keratin or melanin etc. can survive fossilization as they are resistant enough to replacement. The Nevadan orogeny based on some of the newer papers including some of the preprints from the Baja BC Penrose conference work Nick Zentner has hosted on his site is the Orogeny formed when North America ran into the Insular volcanic archipelago of which the subducted slabs are now in the lower mantle beneath the Eastern USA. Most of those arc rocks have been carried North up into BC and Alaska as part of the Baja BC Orcas plate but bits survive in the more ancient but largely overprinted by younger intrusions Sierra Nevada batholith. Notably that was the collision which involved the North American passive margin and associated ocean crust getting subducted into an oceanic arc triggering slab failure and eventually arc polarity reversal much as is occurring today in New Guinea and Taiwan as these arcs have been overprinted by the Australian and Eurasian continental margins respectively.

[@sheilagraham8543]

Fascinating: thank you Shawn.

[@7inrain]

What an awesome museum you have there. Allowing visitors to touch real dinosaur bones? I recently was in the Neanderthal museum and they also had a few skulls on display of all sorts of famous Hominines (Neanderthals, H. erectus, Australopithecus afarensis etc.) that you were allowed to touch. But these were clearly casts.

[@THX5000]

I worked in the backcountry around Vernal. We found all kinds of fossils. Tortoise shells, dino bones, and Native American artifacts.

[@corrinneloudon525]

We took our 2-year old granddaughter to her local zoo and dinosaur park at the weekend. Brilliant animatronics in extensive woods 🙂. It’s lovely to watch this video and remind myself of real geology and fossils!

[@clydebennish2106]

I never caught the Dinosaur Bug, but back in the1960s the little book by zim, shaffer, and perlman called ROCKS AND MINERALS set my mind on fire. It was published the year i was born (1957) and by 1962 was in its 15th printing. Of course many rock layers are dated using fossils so a geologist soon becomes aquainted with them and the dating scheme now widely accepted. Ill have to admit to a greater interest in cultural anthropology than anything else in the field of living things, but physical geology is number one - although your roadside cuts vids draw my attention significantly to palaeogeology ... thanks. Question: Will there be a 201 series?

[@ronaldwilton7150]

In July of 1993 we stopped there on our way to Calgary, Canada. I was blown away! Our son was 13. What an experience and education for him! Glad it's still maintained! Great video!

[@Ari-jj9op]

I was there when I was six years old! Very cool. Wish I'd been a little older just to appreciate it more. My grandfather was a rock-hound and we drove there from Michigan to see it. Thanks.

[@sueellens]

I’ve always loved fossils and would find small pieces of shale to break apart in upstate N.Y. streams, finding shells, etc. I would love to go to this monument. Thank you so much for recording this and sharing.

[@LisaBelleBC]

Wow! I didn’t know about this park. Thank you for the field trip! In the Greater Cincinnati/Northern KY airport they have fully constructed dinosaur bones that have been put together for full dinosaur display. So cool. How cool would it be to find a dinosaur bone on a hike?! Once again a great video! Thanks!

[@elainejones5109]

This was a fun episode! Spotting dinosaur bones in the field can be a huge challenge because usually, only a small portion of a bone may be visible. Dinosaur National Monument is special because of the raw quantity of easily spotted bones. It’s a must-visit location!

[@jforce91]

bigger bones are more than likely to be camarosaurus or similiar sauropod remains, from what i know about the local geology/species :)

[@barrydysert2974]

Touching insitu dinosaur fossils. A new item for my bucket list !:-)

[@irmaoksanen6830]

I assume this same geography extends up into Alberta Canada with many dinosaur discoveries there.

[@brentmckee8]

Use to live across the river. It was pretty neat how the dino bones were up on the hill, not far to the south I found shark teeth and clam shells, towards the north you could find squid fossils, then an hour south in the mud stone of Lake Uinta would be camel, tortoise, early primate, and fish fossils.

[@leechild4655]

Super fascinating place with all those dino bones in such a relatively small area. And not just the bones but all the material that make up the matrix of it all. What are the many elements that make up the layers of rock. I don`t know what is more interesting to me. the bones or the rock layers. The rock layers can tell exactly what was going on there in the deep past so could make the bone piles more apparent as to how and why they all ended up there in great numbers.

[@hestheMaster]

Pretty sure at the time those dinosaurs had live the continent was in an area that was very humid and tropical in nature. It was more like the tropics nearer the equator and plenty of grasses and long extinct tropical trees. so the dinosaurs that were plant eaters came by and munched on those plants followed suit by predator dinosaurs that then ate them!

[@JanetClancey]

Oh wow…. Love fossil hunting here in the uk…. Those are fabulous … thank you 🙏

[@Tatterdemalion-77]

This is certainly on my wish list to visit. What an amazing place and what great forward-thinking that went into creating this site.

[@dennisfisher1430]

I got one: geologist talks to flintknapper as they source some good stone and do a little knapping.

[@pmdempsey9742]

This is so interesting but the camera movement is making me feel seasick so cannot watch it😭😭

[@ThatOpalGuy]

I visited there once, when my kids were 12, if I remember correctly. It is a very interesting place.

[@iain3411]

In Alberta I've been to the Tyrrell Museum. Very cool to see.

[@douglasdunn7267]

Thanks!

[@shawnwillsey]

Thank you kindly for your donation in support of geology education.

[@xwiick]

Thanks for all the hard work on these videos!

[@sheilaathay2034]

I lived in Moab when I was little. My folks wanted to take us there to see the dinosaurs. I did NOT want to go. I was scared of dinosaurs. Even the bones😂❤

[@clydebennish2106]

Im with you... i get the jitters around old ghost towns, mining camps, and old animal remains like fossils.... although plant fossils dont bother me nor anything recently dead... just that old stuff... yuck!

[@kimberlykalenske7645]

I want to be a protagonist!

[@arlahunt4240]

I sure enjoyed this video.

[@LisaEggleston-kd6ur]

Love this, thanks Shawn

[@recentparty8369]

Not surprize by seeing you on the FAKE dino topic ( whales and crocodile will make the rest ... But it is clasified Billy !!!) PLETOSAUR in UK what a super crocodile skull no ?

[@7inrain]

Maybe you should learn something about real dinosaurs. Not the fake ones like the Pletosaurs who were discovered (and lied to you about) by the great greek philosopher Pleto.

[@recentparty8369]

@@7inrain Dinosaurs and oil another scam for graduates ( whales and other mola mola bones if you prefer ... )

[@oyka]

thank you!

[@Ztone4]

Tack!

[@carlwest859]

Great explore, You fulfilled one of my requests, find some fossils. But there were no foot prints, can we be sure those are genuine dino bones? :) Thanks again.

[@jeffbybee5207]

Carl my understanding is that many of the rich fossil pockets were depositional spots in rivers flowing across a flat ish landscape and the reason many animals are found together is they floated or were washed in dead not walking around right there

[@carlwest859]

@@jeffbybee5207 The Happy face in my comment means I was stirring up a little humor for the Prof. Where I'm located foot prints occur here and there, along with sharks teeth and many other fossils. USA has all sorts of treasures. Thanks for your reply.

[@sjmazzoli]

thank you

[@skyedog24]

Great stuff

[@rickallen3278]

Neat one.

[@robertfarrimond3369]

Very Cool!

[@YOICHIHAGIWARA]

ありがとうございます！

[@tomday7309]

Cool.

[@CottonMitts]

💕🥰

[@Riverguide33]

👍

[@pinettesteve]

the quarry south of Price UT is an active dig site and the deposit is wild. lots of theropods and sauropods.

[@russell3380]

TYVM.

[@perguto]

Interesting video, but unfortunately the low video quality makes it very hard to see the fossils (even though it's technically 1080p, the overdone smartphone digital sharpening creates "fake detail" in the rocks, and I also suspect that this sharpening takes up unnecessary bandwidth in the KZbin encoding, so that KZbin's compression further degrades the quality)

[@slidefirst694]

Is this the original Jurassic Park?