Dinosaur National Monument - the historic quarry

Perhaps the greatest attraction at Dinosaur National Monument is the historic quarry (now a museum). The Quarry Visitor Center is built on the location where a massive bone bed was discovered and excavated. The bone beds are part of the Morrison Formation. The foreground of the image shows steeply dipping strata of the Morrison Formation, Jurassic sedimentary rocks composed of stream and floodplain sediments deposited across a broad coastal plain. The bone beds were discovered by a paleontologist from the Carnegie Institution, Earl Douglass, in 1908. Around the time that Earl Douglass made his discovery, museums from around the country were investing in paleontological expeditions throughout the west, and other significant discoveries had been made in the Morrison Formation in Colorado and Wyoming. Douglass had come to this remote area specifically to find dinosaurs. His discovery led to the establishment of the National Monument at this quarry site in 1915 (Elder, A., [2000]).