Free Experimental Outdoor Dinosaur Museum in Utah
To see an exciting, experimental outdoor dinosaur museum, as stop at the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Trail in, Utah will be a small adventure that you will never forget. The sign from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) at the entrance says it all “The Mill Canyon Dinosaur Trail is an outdoor paleontological museum. The self -guided trail contain 150 million year old skeletal remains of numerous kinds of dinosaurs including allosaurtus, camptosaurus, stegosaurus and camarasaurus. It also contains petrified wood. The Morrison formation is one of the most famous dinosaur bearing deposits in the world. There are no guards or fences here. You, the visitor, are the protector of this valuable resource. It is illegal to remove or disturb dinosaur bone and petrified wood. Trail starts at the register box and is only .25 miles in length.”
Where else can you walk right up to a fossilized dinosaur, still embedded in the rock that encased him during the Jurassic period? Most of Utah’s well-known dinosaur fossils are Late Jurassic dinosaurs. They are found mainly in a rock unit known as the Morrison Formation which dates to approximately 150 million years ago. The area will give you a view of faulted Salt Wash of Morrison against Middle Jurassic Navajo and Windgate Sandstones.
Among the highlights are a well defined femur bone and a vertebral remnant. There are 15 stops along the trail with
12 of them bones of sauropods and a Allosaurus. These are easily identified with the self-guiding pamphlet available at the trailhead. Another interesting feature of the trail is the packrat midden. Packrats collect everything within 200 yards of their midden, this builds up over the years and becomes a valuable indicator of time and climate.
The trail is easy to find, right off highway 191. This is a washboard road for much of the way, and will be impassible when it is raining. There is little signage and it seems like you are in the wrong place, because it seems like you are driving into the middle of nowhere. Keep a lookout for wildlife in the area, as you may see coyote, snakes or rabbits. After a drive on a one lane sandy, rutted dirt, road, and just at the point where you’ll wonder if you took the correct turn, you’ll come upon a tiny parking area and a sign, and see the markers for the “Outdoor Museum.”
Geologically speaking, you have reached a part of the Morrison Formation. Start by picking up one of the small brochures at the beginning of the trail: it is essential to finding the fossils, and identifying them.
You’ll feel a sort of reverence and have a feeling of responsibility as well. These fossilized dinosaurs that have been embedded in this rock for a million and a half years are right out in the open, and the only thing keeping them there is your integrity. I like to think of it as letting them rest in peace, as well as leaving them for my children’s children’s children to see and wonder at, just I did. It is an act of faith in mankind that these fossils are left in their natural state and marked for people to see.
There are a dozen numbered stakes making the location of dinosaur bones at Mill Canyon. Some of the fossils – purple/dark-grey in color – are distinguishable as femurs or vertebrae, but we would have simply breezed by most of them as flecks in the rock. When you look at the markers, and the brochure, it dawns on you, and you then have the delight of discovery when someone in your party identifies one of the fossils. It is a treasure hunt of the most wonderful kind.
A mold of a large trunk of a araucaria-like tree is also seen. Alkali salts in the Brushy Basin member give the green color to the rocks. Lakes that dried up left these salts.
The trail is not heavily trafficked, and you may well be the only ones there. There are no bathroom facilities, no souvenir stands, so bring water and wear a hat. It seems as though you just stumbled upon these fossils yourself, adding to the excitement of discovery. It’s tempting to wander around, hoping perhaps to discover new, unmarked fossils, so be sure to have your supplies and be careful not to get lost. Follow the stream bed if you must wander.
The dry climate and eroded landscape of today is very different from the environment that existed when dinosaurs roamed southern Utah. Climates were mild and moist during the Jurassic period 150 million years ago. The Morrison Formation is a complex series of clays, shales, and sandstones that settled in swamps, bogs, shallow lakes, and the broad and often slow moving streams that wandered over a low-lying featureless landscape. Cycads, ginkgoes, and conifers formed forests, shading undergrowth comprised largely of ferns. Horsetails and succulent plants grew abundantly in swamps and bogs.
Be alert for snakes. A recent visit put me face to face with a small snake that turned out to be a gopher snake that does a great imitation of a rattlesnake. Fortunately this gopher snake was not interested in me, even though I made the foolish mistake of following him rather closely to get good photos. This is not a safe idea and could have had a very bad outcome, so if you see a snake of any kind, stay away. After this encounter I also learned that small snakes can be very dangerous, as they don’t regulate their venom, and therefore strike with full force of all their venom.
When you are done at the fossil site, drive back and take the turn for the Halfway Stage Station. .A short distance from the trail are the stabilized remains of the Halfway Stage Station which served as a rest area for the traveling public between Moab and the railroad at Thompson from 1883 to 1904. You’ll find a large assortment of metal items that people have found in the area and put back at the site. It was great fun when we found some very old, rusty hand-hewn nails that we added to the many items other visitors had added to the remains of the stage station.
Directions: Immediately north of mile marker 141 on Highway 191, take the dirt road on the west side. Cross the railroad tracks and drive 2 bumpy miles on the well-signed dirt road to the parking lot. Hours: 24-7.
No gate. No guard. Just fossils that are a million and a half years old, and your integrity stand at this site. Prove that you value this type of museum and do not remove or disturb anything from this site.
