While we waited for our tires… we were sitting around outside and whattayaknow… the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum was right across the street! What luck! Well… Angie wasn’t allowed in so Bill let me go in to have a look (actually he gave me a strict 15 minutes). I walked through the door and this is what I saw. It’s a good thing I took my camera!
Utah is THE place for dinosaur bones and the CEU has done extensive paleontological work. Most of the collection was found in eastern Utah.
There was colorful petrified wood that was found in Utah.
Fossilized dinosaur eggs.
This is the end of a fossilized dinosaur bone. How can bone be colorful? Similar to petrified wood, after the bone was buried in mud millions of years ago, the cells emptied out, leaving the strong cell walls, preserving the structure of the bone (or wood). As ground water seeps in, minerals from the surrounding area fill in the empty cells. The colors come from those minerals and are unique to the combination of minerals in the area.
Stegosaurus plates
This map shows where the ancient sea Mancos was at the tail-end of the dinosaur age and is the reason we find marine fossils in the center of North America.
Amber… ancient tree sap, perfectly preserved.
Coprolite… ancient fossilized dinosaur poo.
CEU has done extensive work on dinosaur tracks.
If you ever see anything that looks like these in some rock, suspect that they may be dino prints.
There were rock fossils.
Some of the latest dinosaur finds were exhibited.
Just heard that two new dinosaur species that are closely related to Triceratops were discovered in southern Utah. There was talk about it all over the museum today. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100922/ap_on_sc/us_dinosaur_discovery
Even to fill in the missing pieces of how dinosaurs transformed and evolved.
These Iguanodon bones and teeth were discovered right in Price.
There were some impressive Native American artifacts.
These carved stone faces are a mystery. What purpose do you think they served?
This one was used as a door stop at someone’s home before they realized it belonged in a museum.
There was an extensive collection of these etched stones. It is thought that they could have been used for counting, as gaming pieces, art or as sacred objects.
This intact pitch was found in nearby Nine Mile Canyon.
Small tools made from bone or stone.
This is an amazing headdress is adorned with shells.
These figurines are from the Fremont Indian culture.
These are fossilized Spruce Pine Cones and are 10,000 years old.
Here are some that were recently collected in the same area for comparison.
The pine cones were found when they were excavating this guy. He is a bull Columbian Mammoth that was discovered when the nearby Huntington Reservoir was drained for construction. He is over 95 percent complete.
It was really quite an amazing find. It is the most complete of any yet found and has been replicated for museums all around the world.
There was even a comparison of a Mammoth tooth to a Mastodon tooth.
Smile!