Built To Showcase The Many Historic Dinosaur Sites In The Area Of Moab And Includes Both Indoor And Outdoor Attractions
A hundred million years or so ago, the region around Moab, Utah was very different from what it is today. Great seas, lakes and swamps expanded, then dried up. Huge sand dunes piled up on the shores. Many of the inhabitants of this land were huge as well. This was the age of dinosaurs.
For an unimaginably long time, from the Late Triassic 210 million years ago to the Late Cretaceous, ruled by T. Rex and Triceratops, which ended in the Great Extinction 65 million years ago, the region that now surrounds Moab was home to a wide variety of dinosaurs, many of whom left footprints in the damp soil. Sand from the dunes, turned red by iron oxidation, blew into the tracks, preserving them, and eventually forming layer after layer of red sandstone on top.
Today this red rock country stretches across the American Southwest, from Colorado to Arizona and Nevada. Some of the nation’s most spectacular scenery is found here, including Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah, as well as Arizona’s Petrified Forest and Nevada’s Red Rock Canyon outside of Las Vegas. This formation also contains some of the best dinosaur deposits in the world, including Dinosaur National Monument on the Colorado-Utah border, where the remains of 1,500 dinosaurs remain imbedded in a quarry wall.
Thanks to the dry conditions and lack of vegetation, the region around Moab is uniquely rich in the traces of dinosaurs - not just bones, but dino footprints. “Eastern Utah is an amazing area for paleontologists,” Dr. Gerard Gierlinski, who specializes in the analysis of dinosaur traces, tells The Buzz. “There is no other place like this anywhere. The whole storybook of dinosaur history is written right here on the earth.”
Gierlinski teamed with fellow paleontologist Dr. Martin Lockley more than 30 years ago to hunt for dinosaur tracks in the red rocks around Moab. The pair were spectacularly successful.
“We found hundreds of dinosaur footprint sites within 50 miles,” Lockley explains. “Most of the land here is [operated by] BLM [Bureau Of Land Management] and [they’ve] chosen five sites to interpret. We [have] worked on all five.” The five sites, Mill Canyon, Copper Ridge, Poison Spider, Windmill and Bull Canyon, are densely clustered within a 20 minute drive from Moab.
Lockley and Gierlinski established a Utah base camp near the intersection of US 191 and State Road 313 on what they assumed was more BLM land. The site was a convenient one: Arches National Park and Moab are a short distance down 191; Canyonlands and Dead Horse Point State Park are close by the other way.
When they discovered, about eight years ago, that the land where they camped on was privately owned and for sale, a plan began to hatch between the two. Both Gierlinski and Lockley were early adopters of the now generally held belief among scientists that dinosaurs are the ancestors of today’s birds. In fact, Dr. Gierlinski provided some of the earliest proof of this theory when in 1994 he discovered the imprint of early proto-feathers, small brush-like structures, left by the belly of a sitting dinosaur, on a slab stored at Amherst College. His 1996 paper on this find showed that dinosaurs were already developing feathers 150 million years ago, in the region that would become the Americas.
Dr. Lockley recently contributed his own definitive piece of evidence to the bird ancestor theory. At several sites in western Colorado, north of Moab, his team has discovered “scrape sites,” left by the theropod ancestors of birds about 100 million years ago. The scrapes resemble marks created during the mating rituals of several bird species still witnessed today. These bathtub-like depressions in the ground, many containing dinosaur footprints, are the first physical evidence of dinosaur display rituals ever discovered, according to Lockley, and support the hypothesis that many so-called “giant lizards” actually looked more like birds – with bright plumage, flamboyant crests, and acute vision, all elements of bird mating displays.
How great would it be, Lockley and Gierlinski, thought, if they could build a museum at their old campsite, to help people interpret the many dinosaur sites in the area? Gierlinski, who had been involved with the development of several Paleo parks in Poland, knew some potential investors, and the Moab GiantsDinosaur Park and Museum was born.
The $10 million facility opened in September, 2015, and includes both indoor and outdoor attractions. Inside the Tracks Museum, a variety of high tech interactive exhibits explain the geology and prehistory of the region, and how the dino tracks were preserved and discovered. Gierlinski’s “sitting dino” with its proto-feathers is brought to life in one exhibit. Another demonstrates how the scrape marks discovered by Lockley figured in theropod mating rituals. A brief film on the area’s prehistoric era runs in the 3-D theater. A “5-D” paleoaquarium, immersing visitors in virtual underwater scenes from long ago, is scheduled for completion later this year.
Outside, the 45-acre park is crossed by the half-mile long Dinosaur Trail, winding past a recreation of the paleontologists’ original camp, an area where kids can dig for fossils, and a Paleo themed playground. Arranged in chronological order along the trail are more than 120 life-sized recreations of the dinosaurs that roamed the Moab region from the Late Triassic to Late Cretaceous, alongside casts of the tracks they left in the sandstone. Most of the accurately rendered models feature early hair-like feathers and crests.
“Moab Giants is all about the tracks,” Dr. Gierlinski said. “We sit in the middle of what they call the Dinosaur Diamond, with many dinosaur sites in every direction. We wanted to build an educational center to interpret these dinosaurs and explain how we can read their history and behavior in the footprints they leave.”
Although the two scientists camped on the eventual site of Moab Giants for many years, they never discovered any dino tracks on the property. During the building of the museum, however, workers turned up stones containing tracks. Now, Dr. Gierlinski says, he and Lockley are taking a closer look at their home turf as the scientists continue to make exciting discoveries about dinosaur behavior.
Renee Wright
A graduate of Franconia College in Social Psychology, Renee has worked as Travel Editor for Charlotte Magazine and has written three travel guidebooks for Countryman Press among other writing assignments. She enjoys food and camping.
Make Sure To Stay At:
OK RV Park & Canyonlands Stables, with beautiful views of the surrounding red rocks and mountains. Set off in its own little oasis, the park is very quiet and low key with a relaxing and inviting environment, but yet 5 miles from all the action and things to do in Moab.