Out of gray sand and gravel of southern Utah comes a startling dinosaur find. Paleontologists are hailing dinosaur skin imprints unearthed this week as one of the state's most important recent fossil discoveries.
Found in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, 23 miles south of Cannonville, Garfield County, the fossil is the tail of a hadrosaur, a type of duck-billed dinosaur. Not only is it the first hadrosaur found in southwestern Utah, it's only the second set of dinosaur skin impressions to be excavated in the state.
"It's just beautiful," said Alan Titus, paleontologist at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Titus discovered the hadrosaur's tail bones in 1998 while surveying the new monument's fossil resources but had no idea they were associated with skin imprints until Wednesday.
Titus said excavators were working to protect and turn the fossil over, "and all of a sudden they made a split (in rock) and they started getting these patterns." The patterns were imprints of dinosaur skin.
Sections of skin were preserved in the tail and rump regions, he said. Not much more than the tail and rump remains, as the rest of the dinosaur eroded away except for some bone fragments.
The skin impressions look like a series of polygons, each about the size of a person's thumb, arranged in geometric patterns, Titus said.
Helping in the recovery effort is David Gillette, former Utah state paleontologist, now curator at the Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff.
Titus said that after the remains are removed from the ground, they will be taken to the Flagstaff museum where they will be separated from the rock matrix and studied.
"Then, the odds are that we're going to bring this specimen back and show it in one of our visitor centers here in Utah," Titus said.
Contacted by cell phone at the dig, Gillette said the dinosaur fossil dates to the late Cretaceous era, which ended 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs died out.
"The portion of the tail we have preserved is about 12 feet long," Gillette said Thursday. "We're in the process of excavating it and removing it now."
The skin would have had bulbous plates "very tightly connected." One of the sections of skin impressions is about 5 square inches, while the other is the size of a large grapefruit or small volleyball, he said.
Few dinosaur skeletons have been found anywhere in the world with skin impressions, and many of them are from Canada, Montana and Wyoming. Only one other — also a hadrosaur — was discovered in Utah. That was in the Book Cliffs near the Colorado border, according to Barry Albright of the Museum of Northern Arizona, who commented on the dinosaur by e-mail.
The hadrosaur probably belonged to the genus Parasaurolophus, he said. The scientists believe it's probably a Parasaurolophus because it is a hadrosaur and comes from an area not too far from the site where a Parasaurolophus was found. A strange tube stuck from the top of the head of this type of dinosaur, probably to allow it to make sounds.
Gillette estimated that in life, the creature could have been 25 feet long and weighed four to five tons.
Removal of the remains was slated for Friday.
E-MAIL: bau@desnews.com