Archives West Finding Aid

The Dinosaur National Monument was created in 1915, six years after an amazing collection of dinosaur bones was discovered in a rockface near Vernal, Utah. The man who discovered the site was Earl Douglass who worked for the Carnegie Musuem in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. He was among a group of men involved in a "dinosaur rush" where paleontologists competed with one another to discover and name the most dinosaurs. What distingushed the rockface that Douglass discovered was the abundance of dinosaur fossils. According to the geological record, the area that makes up the current site was once a waterhole that many dinosaurs flocked to. Over time the waterhole dried up and the dinosaurs in the area died of thirst. Many years later the waterhole reappeared and the dinosaurs returned, only to die once again when the area dried up again. Through this process a large concentration of dinosaurs became located at the site Douglass would discover millions of years later. While many fossils from the rockface rest in museums around the country, there are still more that rest in the rocks of Utah. The rockface was expaned by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s and in 1957, a visitor's center was built on top of the rockface. The Visitor's Center was an attempt to showcase the rockface and the position of fossils in it. Unfortunately, by its very nature, the Visitor's Center was built on unstable soil and in 2006 it was deemed a risk to park visitors and staff. Although the Visitor's Center closed to park visitors, a virtual tour of the rockface was made available over the internet. The rest of Dinosaur National Monument stayed open and contains many areas of scenic beauty.