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

Dinosaur delivery

Partners president Noel Poe brought us an early Christmas present this week: A dinosaur.

Noel delivered the new cast of a Diabloceratops skull, made for us by a company in Colorado. Diabloceratops, a plant eater who lived 81 million years ago, was discovered on the Monument earlier this decade.

The BLM info sheet on this guy describes him as a “cranky Cretaceous critter” that was “the size of a mini-van, with a lavish headdress, intimidating horns and a grouchy disposition.” (For more on Diablo‘s discovery on the Monument, click here.)

While Diablo‘s horns may have kept other creatures at bay 81 million years ago, today those multiple pointy horns bring people in for a closer look. The Diablo cast that graced our Western Legends booth a few months ago drew in both the kids and the grown-ups. Other casts from the Monument’s traveling exhibits have been to the National Boy Scout Jamboree outside Washington, D.C.; the Flagstaff Festival of Science; the Amangiri Resort; Ruby’s Inn outside of Bryce Canyon National Park and other places. The new Diablo will likely have a similar hectic travel schedule.

Since not everyone can make it to the Monument’s Big Water visitor center, or to the Monument paleo lab to see the beasts that paleontologists are unearthing from the Monument, the Monument pays for the casts to travel. (Partners pays for the casts to be made, from a grant we received through the BLM.) The casts are full-sized and touchable.

Here’s what Noel told us about the shop that makes the casts:

Rob (Gaston) has a business of constructing “plastic” casts of dinosaurs. His shop was filled with all sorts of partial dinosaurs. It was difficult to walk through the shop for fear of bumping up against something and breaking it — “you broke it, you brought it.”

The most exciting one for me was the full-body mount of a 30 foot alligator of which GSENM has a cast of the skull. It was huge and not something you would want to meet in a swamp, river or lake.

That body cast, of the animal known as Deinosuchus, should be done at some point soon. In the meantime, to get an idea of the size of this monster, have a look at the cast of its skull.

Amazing to think that all of these critters have been dug up from the Monument in just the past decade.

If you’d like to book one of these casts for your classroom or educational event, please contact Monument Interpretive Specialist Mary Dewitz at 435.644.4304.

- Beth Kampschror, Communications Coordinator

GSENM dinos wow Flagstaff

“Wow! This is awesome!” I heard that all Friday evening at the Sundara Gallery in Flagstaff, Arizona. My name is Scott Richardson and I am a seasonal paleontological technician at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. I had brought a traveling exhibit of two ceratopsid dinosaurs to Flagstaff as well as a few real bones from a hadrosaur. The first Friday of each month in Flagstaff is Art Walk, where most downtown businesses stay open into the night and host live entertainment and traveling artists for the public. In October, the Art Walk coincides with the Festival of Science where the many local scientific businesses and organizations show off their expertise. It is a big party and the dinosaur traveling exhibit was a huge hit with the locals.

Because the exhibit was not finalized until late in August, it was not possible to get the word out in time so those who came to view the event were walk-ins or had heard about the exhibit via word of mouth. Even then, we had over 600 visitors Friday, and some 300 the previous three days. By the end of the exhibit on Sunday, we will easily exceed 1,000 people.

People love dinosaurs. Whether it is the awe of their size or the fact that these monsters walked around so very long ago and are now gone, dinosaurs bring out the eight-year-old in everyone. As I tell people, some of us never do outgrow them. That the two ceratopsid skulls were casts did not seem to matter to the visitors, especially the kids. However when they reached out to touch the real hadrosaur femur or the skin impressions I had included, there was an almost reverent look on their faces.

The Monument hopes to return next year with a larger and longer-lasting exhibit for our neighbors to the south. After all, GSENM is only three hours north of Flagstaff, and to this outdoor-loving mountain community, that is part of their back yard too.

–Scott Richardson, October 2, 2010

Editor’s note: As part of Grand Staircase Escalante Partners’s mission to educate the public about the riches of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Partners has helped fund these traveling exhibits.