| Perhaps the greatest attraction at Dinosaur National Monument is the historic quarry (now a museum). The Quarry Visitor Center is built on the location where a massive bone bed was discovered and excavated. The bone beds were discovered by a paleontologist from the Carnegie Institution, Earl Douglass in 1908. This discovery lead to the establishment of the National Monument at this quarry site in 1915 (Elder, A., [2000]).This image shows steeply dipping strata of the Morrison Formation of Jurassic age-a sedimentary rock formation consisting mostly of stream and floodplain sediments deposited across a broad coastal plain about 145 million ago (Trujillo and others, 2006). Around the time that Earl Douglass made his discovery, museums from around the country were investing in paleontological expeditions throughout the west, and other significant discoveries had been made in the Morrison Formation in Colorado and Wyoming. Douglass had come to this remote area specifically to find dinosaurs. |
