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About Dinosaur National Monument:
For a long stretch of the early 20th century, the area now known as Dinosaur National Monument was the near-exclusive hunting ground of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The site was discovered in 1909 by a Carnegie paleontologist, and over the next dozen years, hundreds of tons of fossils were shipped back east, including near-intact specimens of Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, and Stegosaurus. In fact, part of the reason President Woodrow Wilson turned this isolated stretch of land into a national monument in 1915 is that Carnegie was trying to buy the territory, which would have resulted in its having a fossil monopoly.
Dinosaur National Monument is most famous for its slice of the Morrison Formation, a huge expanse of late Jurassic-period rock that covers 1.5 million square miles of the North American continent. It's believed that the Utah portion of the Morrison Formation was once a low-lying floodplain crisscrossed by various rivers; periodic floods drowned the dinosaur population, and their bones were well-preserved in the silt for the next 150 million years.
Unfortunately, the Quarry Visitor Center of Dinosaur National Monument has been closed for the last few years, in part because the same geologic formation that preserves dinosaurs so well has proven to be an unstable foundation for this large (and popular) building! However, some fossils can still be seen by taking the half-mile hike from the temporary visitor center, as the main installation undergoes repairs.
