Hiking the Museum

There are dinosaurs in Utah.

Not living, of course, but fossils remain in canyons and quarries, washes and 124-million-year-old formations. Twenty years ago, while excavating the spiky, armored anklyosaur later named Gastonia near Arches National Park, scientists found parts of the largest raptor ever discovered, and matched them to a collection of dinosaur fragments found in the 1970s near Moab. The result was a new 20-foot-long predator, a larger cousin of the Deinonychus, soon named Utahraptor. Two years ago, paleontologists found partial fossils of two new members of the Triceratops family in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. They named the larger one Utahceratops gettyi.