Escalante Dino Day

Editor’s note: Nearly 90 elementary school students descended on the Escalante Interagency Visitor Center to learn about dinosaurs on Friday. Partners helped coordinate the field trip, while Monument staff and volunteers ran the stations. Visitor Center manager Jeanie Linn offers her thoughts here:

The entire Escalante Elementary School — 87 students plus teachers and assistants — arrived at the Escalante Interagency Visitor Center on Friday for a program on dinosaurs.

Paleontologist Alan Titus presented a talk on dinosaurs that have been discovered on the Monument and answered numerous questions from the 1^st to 6^th graders. Interpretive Specialist Mary Dewitz gave an interpretive program on the traveling ceratops exhibit, and two Monument volunteers gave a demonstration on how scientists unearth and clean up dinosaur bones. GSEP Education Coordinator Wade Parsons had the event well organized and it went smoothly with the sound of happy kids filling the Visitor Center for three hours.

The kids were extremely well behaved and they asked many great questions. My favorite was “How long does a dinosaur live?” The answer is that it took approximately 20 years for them to reach full size and then they lived for approximately 40-45 years after that!

Later that day when I went to the grocery store, I had several teachers approach me and tell me that the students had a wonderful time and that they just couldn’t quit talking about dinosaurs! Since then we have had a number of the kids bring their families to the Visitor Center to see the traveling exhibits that will be here until the end of February. So the Dino Day Event lives on.

– Jeanie Linn, Escalante Visitor Center Manager

Are you interested in doing this type of interpretive and educational work with students at the visitor center in Kanab? Partners is organizing a pool of volunteers to help out with student field trips this spring. If you’d like to participate, please call Education Coordinator Wade Parsons at 435.644.4354.

Fossil talk packed the house!

Thanks to everyone who turned out for Kirk Johnson’s talk!

Some 150 people showed up to hear about Kaiparowits fossil plants, a Wyoming cave that contains the remains of 40,000 ancient animals, and Kirk’s talent for spotting dinosaur tracks from the car at 65 miles per hour.

Also attending were Diabloceratops eatoni and a juvenile Tyrannosaur — two of the skull casts that make up part of the Partners/BLM traveling exhibits.

If you missed the talk, you can read our article about it here.

And stay tuned for our upcoming multi-media piece about Kirk’s research on the Monument. Kirk and MIT geologist Sam Bowring spent Wednesday sampling a bunch of ancient volcanic ash beds near Big Water.

The two scientists are whittling down the margin of error in dating this ash. The slideshow will have all the details, so please keep an eye out for that as we head through January.

– Beth Kampschror, Communications Coordinator

Fossil Expert to Speak in Kanab

Clear your calendars for Tuesday night: We’re sponsoring a talk by the world-traveling fossil expert Kirk Johnson.

The talk, “Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway: Fossils and Geology of the American West,” based on Johnson’s 2007 book with artist Ray Troll, will interest adults and children who are fans of fossils, dinosaurs and geology.

Please join us at 7 pm on Tuesday, Jan. 11, at the Kanab City Library (374 N Main, across from the hospital). We’ll be serving refreshments after the talk, so please drop by and say hello.

We’ll 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.”

Speaker Kirk Johnson is the chief curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. And he has a Ph.D. from Yale. But if you fear that this talk will be dry or stodgy, rest assured that our speaker is accessible and not afraid to use everyday objects — like a stack of delicious pancakes — to explain complicated subjects like geology.

Here’s another video, where Kirk Johnson and Ray Troll find marine fossils in Washington state.

For more information about Tuesday’s talk, and about Kirk Johnson in general, please click on the news section of our website. See you on Tuesday!

– Beth Kampschror, Communications Coordinator

Hot off the press: Our Fall 2010 newsletter!

Our Fall 2010 newsletter is out! Read all about:

• the new dinosaurs discovered on the Monument
• our work in promoting conservation on the Monument
• the Southern Utah Oral History project
• our new executive director, Roger Cole

Click on the link below to view the PDF version.

Fall 2010 newsletter