Sept 5 - Dinosaurs

Here we are at the Dinosaur National Monument in northeastern Utah.  We were going to come here with Indy last summer, but the park was remodeling the Quarry Visitor Center, so we couldn’t see the dinosaurs.  So we stopped here this time.

This wall is just a short segment of a mountain of dinosaur bones all jumbled together.  They have taken out more than 200 complete or nearly complete skeletons and there are thousands more still here.

Here are thigh bones of herbivores, ribs and spines and claws of carnivores, big dinos, baby dinos, all piled together in a stewpot of bones.

The skull above and the complete skeleton here belong to a young herbivore called Camarasarus.  At first I thought that name was a joke:  the dinosaur you take pictures of with your camera, but no, it’s really the name of the species of dinosaur most frequently found there.

The next most frequent was Allosaurus, who came down to the lake or river to munch on the Camarasauri.

I thought the rock formations outside the gallery were pretty spectacular.  There are a lot of them that looked to me like a dragon taking a nap.