Day 17- Dinosaur National Monument

First thing in the morning Jason drove us to a RV store to attempt to fix our refrigerator, but we were not successful.  We gave up and moved the refrigerator items to the cooler and ventured on to Dinosaur town, where Jason bought some new headlights since the right side brights do not work.  The boys and I checked out the lobby of the dinosaur museum and bought their smashed pennies before we went to the Dinosaur Quarry Visitor center at the Dinosaur National Monument. 

The dinosaur fossil beds (bone beds) were discovered in 1909 by Earl Douglass, a paleontologist working and collecting for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.  A quarry was established and in 1915 Dinosaur National Monument was created to protect 80 acres in the quarry area. Today the monument includes 210,844 acres in Utah and Colorado, encompassing the spectacular river canyons of the Green and Yampa.  Although most of the monument area is in Colorado, the Dinosaur Quarry is located in Utah.  The park contains over 800 paleontological sites and has fossils of dinosaurs including Allosaurus, Deinonychus, Abydosaurus (a nearly complete skull, lower jaws and first four neck vertebrae) and various long-neck, long-tail sauropods.  The rock layer enclosing the fossils is a sandstone and conglomerate bed of alluvial or river bed origin known as the Morrison Formation from the Jurassic Period some 150 million years old.

Many fossils are embedded in a sloping rock formation that was once a sandbar on the edge of a large river. As the river carried animal carcasses downstream, many became stuck on the sandbar, which eventually turned to rock. As a result, fossils from hundreds of creatures are concentrated in a small area. Many fossilized bones have been partially exposed but left intact in the rock where they can be easily seen. A building was constructed over the area, which is now known as "The Quarry" at the monument.

We found more flies and gnats there, but not nearly as bad as at Bryce Canyon.  We ended the night at Mountain Valley RV resort.  Right after we arrived a wind/rain storm rolled in.  We ate dinner and by the time we were finished the storm had passed over.  We took Piper to their dog park, where she met a new friend, Abby to play with.  We all went swimming and sat in the hot tub and the boys played at the play ground.  Great camp ground.