One of Colorado’s least visited national monuments has dark skies, ancient cultures and a whole bunch of dinosaurs
What started as eight dinosaur tail bones in 1909 has turned into 211,000 acres of Dinosaur National Monument
Dan Johnson/National Park Service
DINOSAUR NATIONAL MONUMENT —When you work on a deep geologic time scale, you’re bound to be late once in a while. ReBecca Hunt-Foster, the paleontologist for Dinosaur National Monument, pulled her black pickup truck into the visitor center parking lot 15 minutes after our decided meeting time.
She ditched her backpack in front of a Stegosaurus statue, ducked into the visitor center to fill a water bottle, then climbed back in her truck — license plate DINOCHK — to head to a nearby strip of hillside that she calls “the dig.”
Hunt-Foster is the paleontologist for the entire national monument, a high desert outpost with a gradient of ecosystems, shifting from shaggy, sagebrush hills to red desert rocks that spans the Colorado-Utah border. The sprawling 211,000 acres, with one of the most complete geological records in the National Park System, doesn’t seem to faze her — when she worked for the Bureau of Land Management her area covered closer to 3.5 million acres in southern Utah, she said.
She knows she’ll never get to scrape, brush and drill into most of the roughly 500 sites in Dinosaur that have been identified as containing fossils. She barely makes it out to her own dig two days per week. The rest of the time she’s working on funding applications, organizing volunteer groups, giving talks, working in the museum, reviewing construction plans, attending meetings and hanging out with curious visitor groups.
Read more from Parker Yamasaki at ColoradoSun.com.
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