| Dinosaur bones in the high wall of the Dinosaur Quarry Visitor Center at Dinosaur National Monument. The visitor center (museum) offers more than just dinosaur bones attached to a cliff wall. Visitors can see and experience how much hard work goes into the extraction, preparation, and study of fossils, and interpretation of how the dinosaurs lived and interacted with their environment. Important research at Dinosaur National Monument includes the study of taphonomy (the science of how fossils are preserved). Comparison of the modern world with the fossil record shows that the preservation of the remains of living organisms is an extremely rare occurrence. Understanding how fossils are preserved is a critical part of reinterpreting how organisms lived and interacted with the habitats where they lived and died, and how their remains escaped from being scavenged by other organisms or destroyed by other processes associated with microbial decay and by mineral preservation. |
