Utahraptor skull reconstruction by Rob Gaston of Gaston Design incorporating some material from the Utahraptor megablock. Utah Geological Survey
NPR Morning Edition has a story about a new proposed State Park in Utah. The park, called Utahraptor State Park, would commemorate the discovery of a large block of Utahraptor fossils found back in 2001. The animals lived about 136 million years ago and would have looked similar to Deinonychus, but larger. Utah State paleontologist Jim Kirkland spoke with NPR.
The proposal for Utahraptor State Park, approved by the state House last week and now moving through the Utah Senate, would create a park near the spot where a geology student found a bone sticking out of the sun-bleached ground in 2001.
Researchers who returned to the site near Arches National Park determined that the fossilized bone belonged to a meat-eating dinosaur. The dig began, and what was soon unearthed was a big claw not unlike these associated with the velociraptors from the Jurassic Park movies. Except the real one was bigger.
State paleontologist Jim Kirkland says researchers "got pretty excited." They had found not one, but several Utahraptors.
Previous finds in 1975 and 1991 had provided some information about the dinosaur, but this was the biggest discovery yet. The only hitch was that the bones were encased on a giant block of sandstone.
"There were so many skeletons in this block, you couldn't put an ice pick in it and not hit bones," Kirkland told NPR's Morning Edition.
