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Dinosaur National Monument > The Dinosaur Quarry
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Update - July 2006 - the Dinosaur Quarry and the main park visitor center are closed due to subsidence caused by movement of the unstable soil on which the building is constructed, and is likely not to reopen for several years.
Fossilised bones have been found in many locations in the hills of Dinosaur National Monument, but by far the most spectacular discovery was made by palaeontologist Earl Douglass in 1909, who found 8 segments of the tail of a Brontosaurus at the top of a steep sandstone cliff. Many years of excavation revealed a huge number of bones including some complete skeletons of creatures such as the small Camptosaurus and the plated Stegosaurus, most of which now reside in the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. The longest ever recorded dinosaur skeleton was found here; the bones of a Diplodocus were assembled from parts of 3 separate incomplete individuals to give a skeleton nearly 27 meters long.
Geology: It is now believed that 150 million years ago, this area was part of a riverbed, where a sand bank caused a large number of dead animals washed downstream during flooding to collect in one place. These were then covered by a great thickness of sediment and fossilised. Much later, uplift, bucking and erosion of the surrounding rocks exposed
the bones, now part of a cliff angled at 67° off the horizontal.
The Quarry Building: One section of the cliff about 15 m wide and 10 m high was not fully excavated - instead the bones were uncovered but left in situ. A large glass-walled building, considered futuristic at the time, was built to protect the bones and allow visitors to view them. Today, the slow process of exposing more of the fossils still continues and during the summer, the on-going work and research of the palaeontologists may be observed. The award-winning building was built in 1957; as well as the cliff face, it houses a visitor center, a gift shop, a research laboratory and a small but very interesting museum. This has much information about the methods and tools of the early prospectors, various large bones and several copies of some of the skeletons that were found in the quarry. The cliff face may be viewed from two levels and there is a useful schematic diagram identifying each bone - mainly sections of backbone and limbs but also two skulls although these are hard to spot as they are flattened and distorted.
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