A great many parks on the Colorado Plateau draw their scenery
from Jurassic-aged sediments, and have been reviewed on a fair
number of posts in the last month or two (see here for a
listing). I haven't said much about the dinosaurs themselves
because I was waiting to talk about the ultimate dinosaur park:
Dinosaur National Monument (a most creative name, don't you
think?) The park draws its fame for an extraordinary bone bed
that was discovered in 1909 by Earl Douglass. Although thousands
of bones were quarried and sent to distant museums, there was
enough foresight among the powers-that-were to preserve hundreds
of bones in place where they could be viewed in situ by the
public. By 1915, 80 acres around the quarry were set aside as a
monument by President Woodrow Wilson. The park was expanded in
1938 to include the spectacular gorges of the Yampa and Green
Rivers, an area of some 200,000 acres. The park was the setting
of one of the seminal battles in the nascent environmental
movement in the 1950's when an