‘This is a crisis’: A southern Utah city is set to build a power station on top of a premier dinosaur fossil site

St. George • Buried as they are in the past, scientists and researchers excavating ancient fossils, bones and footprints from a one-acre quarry just north of St. George’s Dinosaur Discovery Site museum are anxious about the future.

In May, excavation on the site rich with early Jurassic period finds must end so construction of a new electric power substation can begin on the city-owned land across the street from the museum on 2180 E. Riverside Drive.

“This is a crisis,” said Jim Kirkland, state paleontologist with the Utah Geological Survey. “And one of my jobs is to attract attention to this so we can save as much of it as we can.”

Fossils on the site, including the area slated for the substation, date back roughly 200 million years to the beginning of the Jurassic period, which followed a mass extinction event in the Triassic period that destroyed about 75% of life on Earth and ushered in the Age of the Dinosaur.

Andrew Milner, lead paleontologist and curator of the museum said the mass extinction paved the way for dinosaurs to become the dominant species for the next 100 million years. He said that also accounts for the importance of the area where crews have uncovered some well-preserved fossilized dinosaur tracks or footprints, among other major finds.

“It is one of the few known early Jurassic sites in western North America,” said Milner, who is overseeing the latest excavation.

Globally, according to Kirkland and Milner, the museum and surrounding areas are viewed as an important reference point for the boundary separating the Triassic and Jurassic periods and are regarded as the second-most important track site in the United States and 18th-most important in North America.

City officials say the new electric substation is needed to keep pace with the fast-growing population and energy demand in southern St. George.

For their part, Milner and others, acknowledge the city has tried without success to find another location for the substation. They also appreciate the city allowing workers to redistribute dirt piles on the land to expedite extracting finds on the one-acre site.

“This not only simplifies the exploration process but also highlights our commitment to supporting and preserving the area’s rich archaeological heritage, even as we meet the evolving infrastructure needs of our growing city,” St. George spokesperson David Cordero stated via email.

A paleontological jackpot

Whatever prehistoric finds are lost due to construction of the substation, museum officials say, the items that have already been found in the surrounding area amounts to a paleontological jackpot. The fossil-rich land laden with dinosaur bones, tracks, and traces of fish and plants has spawned 40 scientific papers to date, lured paleontologists from around the globe and even netted a visit years ago from Matt Lauer, co-anchor at the time of NBC’s “Today Show.”

Some of the signature attractions unearthed nearby and displayed at the museum, which has drawn nearly one million visitors since its opening in 2005, are Eubrontes tracks made by meat-eating dinosaurs that were similar in size to the 23-foot-long Dilophosaurus.

There are also Grallator tracks, which come from a variety of smaller two-legged dinosaurs. Another highlight is the swim tracks meat-eating dinosaurs made as they swam and fished along the shores of ancient Lake Whitmore, a Lake Erie-sized body of water that once stretched from present-day St. George to the Grand Canyon South Rim.

Milner said the tracks were made as the dinosaurs paddled with their back legs and their toes brushed against and left long scratch marks on the muddy bottom of the lake.

One of the site’s marquee attractions is the famous squatting dinosaur track, which coaxed Lauer to the area and is one of about 14 such impressions worldwide. The track shows where a carnivorous dinosaur on a sandbar sat and put its hands down, thus leaving impressions.

From this trace fossil, researchers determined that the dinosaurs’ hands turned inward and did not rotate like human hands.

“So they could hold a basketball but they couldn’t dribble one,” Milner said.

Fueled by anxiety, buoyed by hope

Despite the limited window for excavation on the substation land, Milner and others are hopeful more discoveries will surface as the crews, most of them volunteers, race against the clock to locate and crate off as many fossil and other remains as they can find.

Those hopes are buoyed by scores of volunteers flocking to the site from universities in Utah, Idaho, Montana, Texas and as far away as England. Also pitching in are scientists from the San Diego Natural History Museum and Badlands National Park, among others.

Thus far, volunteers have found three dinosaur teeth that Milner said are worn down from the chewing on the armor-like skin of semionotid and other fish in prehistoric Lake Whitmore. They also have uncovered fossils, bones, traces of two possible new fish species and ancient plants.

All told, Milner said, more than 6,000 dinosaur footprints have been discovered in the area surrounding the museum, which was built five years after local optometrist Sheldon Johnson discovered ancient reptile tracks while leveling a hill on his alfalfa field in 2000.

Today, St. George owns the museum and its collections. The nonprofit DinosaurAH!torium Foundation operates the facility, which attracts 50,000 visitors a year.