St. George • As they race to extract as many fossils, bones and footprints as possible from a St. George dinosaur quarry before construction begins next month on an electric power station, scientists are not pointing fingers at city officials.
Sure, they would prefer the city had found another location for the substation. But they view their rush to excavate the three-quarter-acre site across the street from St. George’s Dinosaur Discovery Site museum at 2180 E. Riverside Drive as a tremendous opportunity.
“We knew there were these amazing fossils in the ground there, but we wouldn’t have this opportunity to remove them if the city wasn’t doing this excavation to build the substation,” said Andrew Milner, lead paleontologist and curator of the museum. “The fossils would remain locked up in the ground.”
Paleontology treasure trove
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Milner said the city previously tried to find another location for the substation and has supplied dump trucks to help remove dirt piles from the quarry. Perhaps more soothing for scientists fretting over the looming deadline is the treasure they are finding in the paleontological trove regarded as, according to Milner, the second-most important track site in the United States and 18th-most important in North America.
To date, Milner continued, workers have collected about 250 specimens in the three weeks since the dinosaur dig began.
“We have been making some really cool finds,” Milner said.
One significant find was uncovered by a volunteer – one of more than 200 who have pitched in thus far – is a large Grallator track, which comes from a variety of smaller two-legged dinosaurs. Last Saturday, Milner added, a volunteer couple found a four-inch-long tooth belonging to a meat-eating dinosaur. A few days later, another worker discovered a smaller dinosaur tooth embedded in a rock.
Other finds include teeth from Lissodus, an extinct genus of hybodont shark found from the early Triassic to the end of the early Cretaceous periods. Rarer and perhaps more exciting was the recent discovery of a Cephalic spine, a horn-like protrusion found on the heads of ancient male hybodont sharks.
Among the more notable fossil finds are some from Coelacanths, an ancient lobe-finned fish that grew up to six feet in length. Milner said the fish were thought to be extinct from an asteroid strike at the end of the Cretaceous until a species surfaced in the Indian Ocean in the 1930s.
Crews on the St. George site have also discovered teeth from Crocodylomorph, forerunners of modern crocodiles, and fossils from semionotid fish, which had armor-like skin and were dietary staples of dinosaurs fishing the area.
(Mark Eddington | The Salt Lake Tribune) Paleontologist Andrew Milner shows off a dinosaur tooth found embedded in a rock at a St. George dinosaur site, Wednesday, March 26, 2025. Volunteers are racing to extract fossils at the site before construction begins on a power substation.
Experts attribute the prevalence of shark and other fish finds extracted from the quarry to its location along the shores of ancient Lake Whitmore, a 200 million-year-old body of water that once stretched from present-day St. George to the Grand Canyon South Rim.
Paleontologists at the quarry say the fossils there, some of them possibly from new species, date back about 200 million years to the early Jurassic period, which followed a mass extinction event in the late Triassic period that wiped out most species and paved the way for the dominance of dinosaurs.
Celina Suarez, a University of Arkansas assistant geosciences professor and an expert on the Triassic-period extinction, has studied the climatic impacts of that annihilation.
“The site we are standing in now is from the earliest Jurassic [period],” said Suarez, who cut her paleontological teeth in Utah years ago as a student intern working the Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur and Crystal Geyser quarries. “What makes this site so important is that we are looking at an area where, just a few hundred thousand years after that Triassic extinction event, life was already thriving.”
Jim Kirkland, state paleontologist with the Utah Geological Survey who is helping supervise excavation efforts, said the finds in the fossil-rich quarry reflect the fact that Utah is one of the world’s top paleontology hotspots.
“When I first started working in Utah,” he said, “there were 22 known [species] of dinosaurs in Utah. Thirty years later, we have about 140. About 1% of all dinosaur species known throughout the world are found in Utah, which is extraordinary.”
St. George’s 20-acre dinosaur site – which includes the city-owned museum, substation and surrounding land – is especially significant. Along with Los Angeles’ famed La Brea Tar Pits, it is one the few municipal paleo sites in existence, according to Milner.
Help wanted, equipment needed
(Mark Eddington | The Salt Lake Tribune) Clayton Forster, a University of Arkansas graduate student, examines grains in a rock at a St. George dinosaur site, Wednesday, March 26, 2025. Volunteers are racing to extract fossils at the site before construction begins on a power substation.
Milner credits Larry Jones and Ammon Bateman with a major assist in excavating the substation site. The construction business owners have used their own backhoes and other equipment to remove dirt so workers could access the fossils in the various soil layers below. All they received in return was money to cover the fuel costs for their equipment.
Still, Milner added, there is so much more to do before the dig ends and construction begins on the substation. He said more volunteers with heavy equipment are needed to remove and rearrange tons of rock and dirt from the quarry so crews can access more of the site.
Another item high on their wish list is one or two metal outdoor shipping containers where all the fossils and other finds can be stored and protected from the area’s scorching sun and occasional rain. Volunteers – especially ones with experience working dinosaur quarries – are also welcomed, as are donations to pay for plaster jackets and other dig-related supplies.
People wishing to volunteer for the dig can sign up on the nonprofit museum’s website. Those wanting to donate cash or enlist heavy equipment and operators in the volunteer effort can email Jaleesa Buchwitz.
