News archive

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February 8, 2012

Partners Comments on Expansion of Alton Coal Mine

Partners President, Noel Poe, submitted comments to the BLM Kanab Field Office (KFO) about the proposed leasing of 2,280 acres of public lands and 1,296 acres of split estate lands (private surface estate and federal mineral estate) to Alton Coal Development for the purpose of extracting coal via surface-mining. The proposed expansion of the Alton coal lease onto lands administered by the KFO falls under the interest that Grand Staircase Escalante Partners has on BLM lands adjacent to the Monument.

Partners is concerned that the expansion of the Alton coal lease, as proposed, will cause unacceptable harm to economic, mineral and non-mineral natural resources, and to the irreplaceable cultural and paleontological resources of the region. Click  Alton Coal Lease Draft EIS comments to read Mr. Poe’s thorough, well-researched assessment of the proposal.

January 27, 2012

Kanab BLM’s New Office Complex to Open in February

The grand opening of the Bureau of Land Management’s new Kanab complex will take place on Friday, February 10, 2012. The complex, on Highway 89A in Kanab, is now home to the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Headquarters and the Color Country District’s Kanab Field Office. The ribbon-cutting ceremony will begin at 3 p.m. and will be followed by an open house, with exhibits and refreshments, until 7 p.m.

The complex, funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, includes a new 16,350 square-foot one-story administrative office building and a 6,200 square-foot warehouse.  The office building incorporates a number of innovative energy efficiency measures, including a 20-kilowatt grid-connected photovoltaic system. BLM Utah anticipates a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) gold rating from the U.S. Green Building Council for the complex.

BLM staff from both offices will be on hand from 4 – 7 p.m. to answer the public’s questions about their specialties and the work they do. Also on hand will be Wade Parsons, Partners’ Education Coordinator, with GSEP’s traveling Discovery Trunk. The trunk contains pottery sherds and arrowheads from the Monument, as well an archaeological timeline and a mural depicting the daily activities of Ancestral Puebloans who lived here more than 700 years ago. Over 1,200 school children and teachers have already experienced the wonders of the Monument through Parsons’ interactive learning sessions during the 2011/2012 school year.

And a side note: On the morning of the grand opening, Parsons, along with volunteers and BLM staff, will lead 150 Kanab elementary through high school students in a xeriscaping activity at the new facility. The students will toss approximately three thousand small clay/soil balls containing seeds of native grasses, sagebrush, and wildflowers onto the bare grounds surrounding the buildings. (The same students will roll the seed balls themselves in the weeks before the event. Parsons will coordinate those activities as well.) This event is not open to the public but its results will be seen by many passersby come springtime!

The new address and phone number for both the GSENM and the Kanab Field Office is 669 South Highway 89A, Kanab, UT 84741, 435-644-1200.

October 26, 2011

Bringing the Monument into the Classroom with Discovery Trunks

Kanab Middle School seventh graders were recently treated to a presentation by Wade Parsons, Education Specialist for the Grand Staircase Escalante Partners (GSEPartners), on the early Native American people of southern Utah.

Middle School teacher Gary Glover invited Wade to guest teach three Utah Studies classes, and Wade shared GSEP’s Archaeology Discovery Trunk with the students. Because the Discovery Trunk is mobile, it is easily transported and is designed to provide students with an in-classroom learning experience about the early cultures that existed over 1000 years ago in southern Utah. Much of this land lies within the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

The Discovery Trunk contains prehistoric pottery sherds with regional decoration styles, stone tools, and samples of yucca weaving. Wade also brought versions of a Regional Archaeological timeline and an image of the Arroyo Site Mural that hangs in the Kanab Visitor Center. The mural depicts Ancestral Puebloans (800-1300 AD) engaged in daily activities such as hunting, farming, food preparation, pit house construction, and gathering wood.

GSEPartners is also developing a Discovery Trunk for fossils, dinosaurs, and geology. The trunks are designed around lesson plans and activity books that fulfill Utah State education standards and objectives so that educators can be trained to teach from the Discovery Trunks.

Wade Parsons is available to train teachers in using the Discovery Trunk(s) for elementary, middle school, and high school classes. Contact Wade at 435-644-4354 or at canislupus@yahoo.com.

 

October 19, 2011

Heading Out to the Monument for Class

KANAB – The school year is in full swing, and once again GSE Partners is connecting schools, students, and educators in southern Utah to the wide range of remarkable outdoor learning opportunities available at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM).

This month, 20 students from the Natural Resource Management class at Kanab High School participated in a field trip to the Monument to identify native plants and learn how native vegetation contributes to healthy ecosystems. GSEP’s Education Coordinator Wade Parsons, Kanab High School teacher Barbara Warner, and botany and wildlife specialists from the BLM took high school students out onto the Monument to observe first-hand how non-native plant species compete with native varieties, and students also learned how non-native vegetation affects wildlife.

 

On another school outing, 60 fourth grade students and educators from Kanab Elementary School visited GSENM’s Kanab Visitor Center, and ground corn on a 1,000 year-old metate (grinding stone), learned how to throw a spear with an atlatl, created designs on pottery, and examined 75-million-year-old fossils.

Kanab Elementary School Principal Pam Aziz joined students on the field trip to the Kanab Visitor Center, and observed that GSEP provides  “ . . . a wonderful program [that is] well organized and meets Utah State curriculum requirements.”

School visits to GSENM’s Visitor Centers are made possible by the generosity of GSEP volunteers. GSEP’s school program is active throughout the school year and welcomes new volunteers to assist in the program. If you enjoy sharing knowledge with young learners, volunteering for GSEP’s education program is right for you.

For more information on volunteering in GSEP’s education program, contact Wade Parsons at canislupus@yahoo.com or 435-644-4354.

July 28, 2011

Archaeological Site Steward Program Expands to Escalante Area

KANAB – The Partners’ Site Steward Program is expanding northward in the Monument. If you want to become an archaeological Site Steward in the Escalante area, you can sign up for in-office training at the Escalante Visitor Center on October 27th. A day of field training will then be scheduled based on everyone’s availability. Site assignments will be given and you can start monitoring your site(s) when you’re ready and weather permitting! To sign up, or for more information, call Karolyn Tenney, 435-644-1306. Note to future Kanab volunteers: You can take the in-office training in Escalante in October and have your field training in Kanab shortly thereafter to join the current cadre of Stewards in the Kanab area.

June 14, 2011

Partners Comments on Hole-in-the-Rock Road Environmental Assessment

KANAB – This spring, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) performed an Environmental Assessment (EA) along Hole-in-the-Rock Road to determine whether organized groups of more than 25, the current limit, could gather without negatively affecting the rich history contained in the area. Larger group numbers would provide opportunities for organized group/heritage activities that haven’t yet been possible. The BLM called for public comment on the assessment through June 17. The Partners Board submitted the following comments to the BLM in response to the Hole-in-the-Rock Road EA:

Partners Comments

To read the entire Hole-in-the-Rock EA document go to the GSENM website: http://www.blm.gov/ut/st/en/fo/grand_staircase-escalante.html.

January 6, 2011

Fossil expert to speak in Kanab

KANAB – A world-traveling fossil expert will be speaking in Kanab on Tuesday about the remnants of ancient life that you can find just about anywhere in the American West.

“The whole premise is that fossils are everywhere, and when you see layered rock you see a page out of the earth’s history – it’s like driving around in an encyclopedia of the earth,” said Kirk Johnson, Ph.D., chief curator of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who will give the talk “Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway: Fossils and Geology of the American West” at the Kanab City Library on Tuesday, Jan. 11 at 7 pm.

Based on Johnson’s 2007 book with artist Ray Troll, the talk will cover the fossils under our feet – from toothy critters like sabre-tooth tigers, T. rexand 37-million-year-old killer pigs called Archaeotherium to the fossil palms, plants and trees that served as dinosaur salads.

“It’s a science talk, but it’s the most fun science talk you’ve ever heard,” Johnson said, adding that the talk is sophisticated enough for adults but will also entertain interested kids.

Johnson is on Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument this month to continue the research on ancient volcanic ash that he and MIT’s Sam Bowring have been doing in the West for the past six years. The two scientists are refining methods to date the ash; those methods are increasing the precision of dating a fossil site so much that the error associated with a 90 million-year-old sample is less than 50,000 years.

Johnson’s first visit to the Monument in the 1980s and his first geology work in 1991 predated the Monument’s designation. His most recent visit was in September, to dig fossil leaves out of the Kaiparowits with a Denver Museum crew.

“The Monument’s cool because it’s so large, and so remote and so unexplored,” he said, adding that it’s a bonanza for geologists and paleontologists. “The fossil leaf sites are little magic worlds, because they’re full of things we’ve never seen before.”

Tuesday night’s talk is sponsored by Grand Staircase Escalante Partners (www.gsenm.org), the 501(c)(3) non-profit that supports science, education and conservation on the Monument. Partners will be serving refreshments. The talk is free and open to the public.

Partners will also be showing off a few of the life-size dinosaur casts that make up the Partners/BLM traveling exhibits. The casts on display may include a juvenile Tyrannosaur, the multi-horned Diabloceratops eatoni, the seven-foot-long head of the newly discovered Utahceratops gettyi, or the massive skull of the incredibly toothy Deinosuchus, whose name means “terrible crocodile.”

“It is exciting that Dr. Johnson has scheduled time to talk to Kanab residents about the fossils that exist right out our back door, and how these local fossils relate to others found in the West,” said Partners President Noel Poe, adding that Partners was glad to be able to display Deinosuchus. This 35-foot-long alligator relative was one of the top predators of the sea during the Late Cretaceous.  “School kids and their parents will get a charge out of seeing this skull,” Poe said.

Kirk Johnson, Ph.D., is vice president of Research and Collections and Chief Curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Johnson joined the Museum in 1991 after earning his doctorate in geology and paleobotany from Yale University. He is best known for his research on fossil plants, which is widely accepted as some of the most convincing support for the theory that an asteroid impact caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Johnson has published many popular and scientific articles on topics ranging from fossil plants and modern rainforests to the ecology of whales and walruses. His research has taken him to Alaska’s Bering Sea, the Brazilian Amazon, the Canadian High Arctic, the rainforests of New Zealand, the Gobi Desert, India, Patagonia, and the American West. During his tenure at the Museum, Johnson has been instrumental in the planning, content creation, and construction of the Museum’s award-winning exhibition Prehistoric Journey. He also coauthored the book Prehistoric Journey: A History of Life on Earth.

November 10, 2010

Partners awards grant to Minnesota student

KANAB – The picture of how ancient earthquakes affected sea levels 80 million years ago on what’s now Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument may now be a little clearer, thanks to a student research project funded by the Monument’s non-profit friends group.

Hannah Hilbert-Wolf, a third-year geology student at Carleton College in Minnesota, was a recent recipient of a Grand Staircase Escalante Partners (GSEP) grant that aims to encourage scientific research on the National Monument’s 1.9 million acres. Hilbert-Wolf, a Pennsylvania native, studied records of Cretaceous-era sea levels, and how their rise and fall might be related to earthquakes that shook this area tens of millions of years ago.

Hilbert-Wolf has been working on the Monument since she was in high school – this past summer was her sixth summer here. During that time she’s also collaborated with other scientists. Though she’s not yet out of college, she’s already been an author on a published paper about dinosaurs that got some high-profile coverage – includingfrom the Smithsonian. Her work with others means that she gets to see a wider picture than if she merely worked alone. “We are just slowly uncovering all of the geological history of the Monument – creating a whole catalogue of what happened on the Grand Staircase in the Late Cretaceous, 80 million years ago or so, and fitting together all the pieces,” she said.

Research trips to Utah – with travel, renting cars, camping, packing and mailing samples – and presenting research at conferences can all add up, Hilbert-Wolf said. “The grant was helpful in every step of the way,” she said. “And the great thing about this grant is that usually the professors are the ones who bring in grant money for research – so it’s helpful if a student can bring in a grant as well.”

Partners’s student grant program benefits more than merely the recipient, said Partners Executive Director Roger Cole. “The grant means that research happens on the Monument’s outdoor laboratory, and the funding enables the next generation of bright young researchers like Hannah to develop their skills,” he said.

Grand Staircase Escalante Partners is a 501(c)(3) organization that supports science, education and conservation on Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. GSEP awards two Student Research Grants of up to $3,000 annually. Projects have to demonstrate relevance to the Monument, as well as demonstrate that the project uses plausible methods and has strong potential for success. Winning proposals this year have focused on paleontology and geology, but the grants are open to student researchers from any scientific discipline. The next application deadline is Jan. 15, 2011

November 1, 2010

Native plants project kicks off second year

KANAB – On a recent weekday, Kanab High School science teacher Barbara Warner quizzed 10 students about plants on the scrubby flats of Petrified Hollow, some 20 miles east of Kanab. “What’s this one here?” she asked, pointing at the compact gray-green bushes that dot this plain on Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. “Sage,” students called out. “Winterfat,” they agreed about another shrub.

(Warner, left, with students at Petrified Hollow. Kanab High School students in Warner’s Natural Resource Management class are participating in Partners’s Native Plant Restoration project.)

Satisfied with the IDs, Warner then scattered the students to collect Winterfat seeds. “Don’t strip the plants – just fill these bags about halfway,” she said, demonstrating with a plastic sandwich bag. Students fanned out on the plain. Within 10 minutes they’d filled their quota.

Plant identification and collecting seed are just a small part of a $38,000, two-year project that aims to grow, study and re-establish native plants on the Monument. Last week’s day out was the first full field day of the school year for the Native Plant Restoration project, which matches Warner’s Natural Resource Management class with Monument and Kanab Field Office staff. Working the logistics of bringing students and the BLM together is done by an education coordinator funded by Grand Staircase Escalante Partners (www.gsenm.org), the non-profit friends group that supports the Monument. This year is the project’s second year.

As fall turns to winter, students will plant the seeds they’ve collected in the school greenhouse; in springtime, students will plant the seedlings on the Monument. Plans are in the works to extend the project to other schools surrounding the Monument. Warner’s class in Kanab is popular, with enrollment increasing by 10 percent every year.

“The students in my Natural Resource Management class really enjoy working with GSENM/BLM staff, and they take great pride in the Winterfat plants they’ve raised from seed and transplanted to their new homes on the National Monument,” she said.

At Petrified Hollow that chilly fall morning, Monument Rangeland Management specialist Allan Bate and BLM Biological Science Technician Web Staley taught the students how to systematically identify and count the number of plant species in a given area. Further away, Partners Education Coordinator Wade Parsons showed another group of students how to map Winterfat stands with GPS technology.

Parsons, whose background includes nearly 20 years of teaching, as well as more than a decade of field archaeology, said the students are getting the hang of it.

“They’ve learned more than they realize,” Parsons said, adding that a former Kanab High School student landed a job at the BLM in St. George thanks to the GPS and mapping skills he learned in the class last year. “Those are real world skills, and students can use them in any land management agency.”

Partners’ education program has several volunteer opportunities available aside from this project. If you’re interested in getting involved, please call Wade Parsons at 435-644-1302.

Wade Parsons also wrote about the field trip for our blog, which is available by clicking here.

October 13, 2010

Partners hires executive director

KANAB –  Roger Cole’s first day on Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was  a bit more than he’d bargained for.

Cole, a Maine native, arrived in Kanab at the end of July to become the director of Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, the non-profit organization that supports the national monument. Cole is no stranger to the outdoors: He’s been an avid road biker for four decades and once operated a 70-foot commercial fishing trawler off the Oregon coast. But a late-summer field trip with researchers intent on quarrying 75-million-year-old fossil plants from the gray badlands of The Blues section of the north Kaiparowits offered an entirely new outdoors experience.

“It was a three mile hike out to the site, and we’re going up and down these massive hills,” said Cole of his trip with the crew from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He’d planned to stay out with the team for just a few hours, but since they’d bushwhacked across The Blues, and he didn’t want to get lost, he figured he should probably stay with them all day. But then the wind came up. “We got sandblasted,” he said, laughing at the memory of the dust-covered crew pulling bandanas over their faces.

Cole began working for the Partners in July after the organization conducted a nationwide search that involved more than 80 applicants for the job. Cole’s 25 years of experience in non-profit management and community planning made him stand out, said Partners President Noel Poe.

“Roger’s experience with non-profits back East was impressive,” Poe said. “We think he can help us turn Partners into a well-organized group that can hold its own and work with other groups on the Colorado Plateau and beyond.”

Partners, which was founded in 2004, has done some restructuring in the past year. It’s still a 501(c)(3) organization that supports Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. But today it aims to attract more research to the Monument, build strong local economies, educate the public, and work to study and apply conservation practices on the Monument.

Partners now manages more than 60 projects with the Bureau of Land Management. Those include helping fund the second year of a native plant restoration project with Kanab High School, funding hydrological research in the Escalante River area to monitor the effects of removing the invasive Russian olive, and funding a cultural history project that gathers oral histories from longtime Monument-area residents.

Roger Cole, meanwhile, has been impressed not just by those researchers in The Blues who put in 10-hour days in the heat, dust and wind, but by the residents in towns surrounding the national monument. “I’ve met so many generous people from Page to Boulder who’ve offered their skills and their dollars and their knowledge to support Partners’ commitment to the Monument,” Cole said, adding that his takeaway from his recent gritty field trip could apply to his new life in southern Utah as well: “It might not have been exactly what I’d expected, but a little flexibility really came in handy – I didn’t have to keep those 7 pm dinner plans,” he said.

October 7, 2010

GSENM paleo finds get worldwide attention

KANAB – The two new dinosaurs found on Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument received coverage not just from the national press, but also the international press.

The two dinosaurs –  Kosmoceratops richardsoni and Utahceratops gettyi –were unveiled by paleontologists at the Utah Museum of Natural History late last month. Both dinosaurs were found on the Monument, and both are bizarre: Utahceratops for having an enormous seven-foot skull, andKosmoceratops for having 15 horns on its skull.

The strange animals that roamed this part of North America some 76 million years ago were not only covered by Utah media such as the Salt Lake Tribune, the Deseret News, KUER and local representatives of wire services like the Associated Press, but also by national outlets like CNN and Fox News. A Time magazine headline called Kosmoceratops “the newest (and horniest) dinosaur.” The websites of scientific national heavyweights like National Geographic and Smithsonian also covered the amazing finds. The dinosaurs were so intriguing that in London – nearly 5,000 miles away from the Monument – the BBC and British newspapers including the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and the Independent all covered them as well.

The dinosaurs and the international coverage they prompted have put Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument on the map, said Raymond Bernor, an official at the National Science Foundation. “This discovery has inspired future discoveries in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which has now emerged as one of the most important paleontological reserves in the world,” Bernor said.

Monument paleontologist Alan Titus agreed. “It’s been very rewarding to see this thing unfold over the past 10 years – because when I first got here, all we talked about was the potential of the Kaiparowits,” Titus said. “Now, the potential outlined in the Monument’s proclamation (in 1996) has been not only realized, but exceeded.”

September 22, 2010

New GSENM dinos named

SALT LAKE CITY – Paleontologists today unveiled a double whammy of horned dinosaurs from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) that until today had been completely unknown to science.

One new species, Kosmoceratops richardsoni – named for Scott Richardson, who was a GSENM volunteer when he discovered it – had a head studded with 15 horns, making it the most ornately headed dinosaur ever found. The other, Utahceratops gettyi, had a seven-foot-long skull. This massive beast was also named for its discoverer, Utah Museum of Natural History’s Mike Getty.

(At left: Richardson with the skull of the fantasticKosmoceratops richardsoni.Richardson found this new dinosaur in 2006; it was named for him today.)

Both Getty and Richardson have dug on GSENM for much of the past decade. When Richardson made his discovery in 2006 he was volunteering with the BLM; Getty’s crew was working in the same area.

When he initially dug up and brushed off bits of the spectacular find, he went to find Getty, who took a colleague to dig further while Richardson went to town for provisions.

“So when I got back, I asked them, ‘How’d it go, what did you find,’ and Getty says, ‘Just a bunch of ribs and verts (vertebrae), not much,’” said Richardson, who’s now a paleo technician at GSENM. “And he was kind of grinning, and then Mike said, “No man, it was awesome…this looks like nothing I’ve ever seen before,’ and he’d of course dug on many ceratopsians here and in Canada, so I knew I had something cool.”

These finds, which date to about 76 million years ago, are just part of the explosion in horned dinosaur diversity that the paleo world has seen in the past decade, going from 15 known species in 2004 to 30 today. They’re also part of the entirely new assemblage of dinosaurs that have been found on GSENM.

(At left: Utah Museum of Natural History Collections Manager Mike Getty with the Utahceratops gettyi,which he discovered.)

“(This find) underscores the point that we’re still scratching the surface,” said Scott Sampson, the lead author on the paper that was published today in PLoS ONE, the online open-access journal produced by the Public Library of Science.

“Grand Staircase is this phenomenal, two million acre scientific laboratory that is relatively unexplored, and it’s there now for science and for education,” Sampson said at the press conference Wednesday. “And these finds underscore the importance of the Monument, and the importance of preserving the Monument, and taking care of the fossils coming off it.”

The study was funded in large part by the Bureau of Land Management and the National Science Foundation. It was led by Scott Sampson and Mark Loewen of the Utah Museum of Natural History and the University of Utah’s Department of Geology and Geophysics. Additional authors include Andrew Farke (Raymond Alf Museum), Eric Roberts (James Cook University), Eric Lund (University of Utah), Catherine Forster (George Washington University), and Alan Titus (Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument).

September 15, 2010

Scientist: GSENM a global hot spot for dinosaur bones

KANAB – The two-million acre monument just outside of Kanab is one of the most spectacular places on the planet to find the remains of dinosaurs, a paleontologist told a packed house in Kanab on Sept. 15.

“You may not realize it because this is your backyard, but this is one of the premiere places in the world to find dinosaur bones,” Dr. Scott Sampson told a standing-room-only crowd at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Visitor Center. And of the 16 or so identifiable species that scientists have found here, he said, “Every single one is new to science.”

But it’s not just quantity that makes the Monument special to paleontology. It’s also quality. Finds on Grand Staircase are giving scientists a window into what dinosaurs might have looked like.

“Elsewhere in the world, finding skin impressions (of dinosaurs) is rare,” Dr. Sampson said. “But here in Utah, most of the complete dinosaur skeletons we find have skin impressions.”

Last Wednesday night’s talk by Dr. Sampson, a paleontologist and writer who also hosts the PBS children’s show Dinosaur Train, was sponsored by GSENM, the Page-based Glen Canyon Natural History Association and Grand Staircase Escalante Partners – the non-profit group that supports science and education on the Monument.

“We’re incredibly pleased to help bring a scientist of Dr. Sampson’s caliber to the Monument to speak,” said Partners Executive Director Roger Cole. “His 10 years of research on the Monument have done a lot to highlight GSENM’s role as a gigantic, open-air laboratory.”

Dr. Sampson also told the audience that scientists’ ideas about dinosaurs have changed dramatically in the past few decades. No longer do scientists believe that dinosaurs were dim-witted and sluggish creatures that plodded through ancient forests, dragging their enormous tails behind them. Today scientists think that some dinosaurs had some degree of cunning, the ability to run and horizontally-pointing tails that balanced the animals’ enormous weights. But paleontologists still must contend with Hollywood versions that are less than accurate. Dr. Sampson described a velociraptor, which the film Jurassic Park depicted as man-sized, lizardy and deadly, as in fact much smaller and covered in feathers.  “It was more like a three-foot-tall screaming chicken that you could probably kick to get out of the way,” he said.

But Dr. Sampson said that paleontology is about much more than just digging up bizarre animals. “We’re trying to reconstruct an ancient ecosystem, to see what that can tell us about today,” he said. “And Grand Staircase is one of the best places on the planet to do that.”

Why should any of us care about this ancient ecosystem, or about dinosaurs, which after all, went largely extinct after a six-mile-wide asteroid struck the earth 65.5 million years ago? “Because we are part of the 14-billion-year-old story,” Dr. Sampson said, adding that the story stretches from the Big Bang that put the universe in motion, to Earth’s formation, to one-celled forms of life, to complex life like plants and dinosaurs, to us and the other creatures we share the planet with today.

We should also care, he said, because until now there have been five major extinctions in Earth’s history, but humanity is the catalyst for another one. “We are right in the middle of the sixth extinction right now, and humans are the asteroid,” he said. Because humanity is causing climate change and crushing the habitats of many animals, birds, fish and insects, half the species on earth right now may be extinct by the end of the century, he said.

The predictions are grim. But everyone can contribute to the solutions. Dr. Sampson’s advice: Get outside, and get the kids in your life outside. Look at birds, which are the descendants of one group of small dinosaurs that survived the asteroid extinction. “You need to learn about the places you love to save them,” he said. Luckily, there’s still much to learn about the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. “There are still vast tracts of the Monument that’s unexplored,” he said.

August 22, 2010

Area student receives GSEP’s first Student Research Grant

Adam Hiscock, a 22-year-old geology major at the University of Utah, was the first recipient of a Grand Staircase Escalante Partners Student Research Grant. He catalogued bone and other samples in the Monument’s paleontology lab in the summer of 2010.

Click here to hear Adam talk about his work. (Audio opens at the Internet Archive, a digital library of recordings and websites.)