Southern Nevadans travel to 'Jurassic Park' in St. George

Members of the Southern Nevada chapter of the Geological Society of Nevada visited the Dinosaur Tracks site in Warner Valley, Utah, about 15 miles southeast of St. George, Feb. 24. Casts of fossil tracks are on display at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm in St. George, Utah. The Geological Society of Nevada, Southern Nevada chapter, traveled to the site on Feb. 24 to get a look at the tracks. Jean Cline, a UNLV geology professor and vice president of the Southern Nevada chapter of the Geological Society of Nevada, looks at a fossil cast at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm with Helena Murvosh, an engineer with Stanley Consultants in Las Vegas. Dinosaurs of all kinds, even the plastic variety, are on display at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm where some of the oldest and best preserved tracks in the world were uncovered in 2000. Keith Vandewark, a docent at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm, explains the different tracks and their meaning to members and other visitors. Photos by Fred Couzens/VIEW Advertisement

In 1993, when Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" played to audiences in a St. George, Utah, theater, nobody knew there was a different kind of Jurassic Park right there in their own backyard.

But seven years later, contractors on a 10-acre site in the southern part of St. George accidentally uncovered such a park containing dinosaur tracks that have yet to be found anywhere else in the world.

Two weeks ago, members of the Geological Society of Nevada, Southern Nevada chapter, traveled to Utah's Washington County to see that site and another one containing dinosaur tracks.

Their first encounter with history from some 150 million years ago was in Warner Valley, a dusty, bumpy 15-mile ride southeast of St. George.

They visited a Bureau of Land Management site called Dinosaur Tracks, but reportedly that's one of several such sites in the remote valley.

"If one were crazy enough, they could go over to those hills and they might find some more tracks," said Bruce Hurley, the environmental monitoring manager for the Nevada Test Site and president of the geological society chapter, as he pointed to some distant hills to the east. "There is more than one track site in Warner Valley."

The group then jumped in their vehicles and made their way back into town just in time to catch a lecture from Dr. Jim Kirkland, the state paleontologist for Utah, who is an expert on dinosaurs.

He gave a 90-minute talk on the Early Cretaceous Period and the Utah-China connection. He called the finding of feathered dinosaurs around Liaoning, China, about a two hour's drive northeast of Beijing, in the mid-1990s "a very important event."

"The biggest discovery in 100 years was finding feathered dinosaurs in China," said Kirkland, who is today helping to uncover Utah's rich dinosaur past with digs in the east-central part of the state. "It's the most important fossil find of the 20th century. What they found was Confuciusomis, which was incredibly abundant. Well over 1,000 examples were found in lake sediments in one layer."

He said the discovery of feathered dinosaurs -- even today's birds are considered to be descendants of the dinosaur age -- that begun in 1996 has no end.

"They keep finding them and finding them," he said. "It won't stop as far as we know. I don't have a clue when it's going to stop."

Kirkland noted that land bridges from Europe, and later across Alaska, were how dinosaurs migrated to North America.

"There used to be a main connection to Europe so that you could walk from Utah to England without getting your feet wet," he said. "That's why the oldest bird tracks in North America are similar to what you find in China."

The reason dinosaur records are being found in great numbers in Utah rather than, say, Nevada, is because of the various geological layers exposed over time.

"Utah has an extraordinary fossil record," said Kirkland, who has named three dinosaurs -- the Utahraptor, the Cedarosaurus and the Moabosaurus -- following his discoveries. "Utah has more dinosaurs than any other country, except Argentina and China. We have different animals at different levels. We have dinosaurs in labs in Utah as we speak that haven't been named yet. Utah has a huge research potential."

The geological society members ventured out into the cavernous building that covers prehistoric rock housed in the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm where fossil tracks were discovered just seven years ago. The building, constructed and opened in May 2005, houses what Utah officials call "some of the oldest and best-preserved tracks in the world ... so far, more than 1,000 tracks have been found within a 10-acre area."

Geological society members got to see only one of two fossil tracks in the world made by a sitting theropod dinosaur and the largest single track block in any museum in the world that weighs 52,000 pounds and has 14 dinosaur trackways on the surface.

It truly was a site for discovery for the Southern Nevada visitors.

"I just thought it would be fun to come see this," said Helena Murvosh, a civil engineer for Stanley Consulting in Las Vegas. "I like to come to museums that show things in their natural setting."

Even the pros enjoyed the visit.

"I'm a geology professor at UNLV," Jean Cline said, "and every geologist likes dinosaurs."

What they saw were layers and blocks of rock covered with tracks that were created when the lakes and ponds that were drying up in the area created mud that the dinosaurs stepped in, leaving an impression.

After that, sand and eroding rock that covered the impressions got compressed and created "negative impressions," or raised surfaces on the rocks, that were discovered by Dr. Sheldon Johnson who later donated his land to the city of St. George.

According to the Utah Geological Society's web page, "Dinosaurs lived only during the Mesozoic Era (225 to 65 million years ago), which is often called the 'Age of Dinosaurs.' Utah has perhaps the best Mesozoic rock record in the world."

The Johnson Farm site is unique to other dinosaur sites in Utah in that 18 dinosaur teeth, a complete backbone and other reptile bone fragments have been found there when it's very rare to find bones and teeth associated with footprints. The site also has very rare dinosaur swim tracks that represent the best preserved collection of their kind in the world and only one of four traces of a meat-eating dinosaur associated with a long trackway, tail drag and clear impressions of the animal's hands while it rested.

It was enough to make lifelong enthusiasts look on in awe.

"I've always been interested in dinosaurs since being a child," said Steven Ninemire, the finance manager for the Easter Seals organization, who was born in Springfield, Mo. "I had a few books as a child, but research was pretty limited back then. But this shows there's been a vast amount of knowledge since the 50s."