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At Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, over
70 individual animals have been found
So, normally when we find dinosaurs and
groups together they're herbivorous
dinosaurs so that's really strange that
almost everything we found here are
carnivorous dinosaurs, in addition to
Allosaurus fragilis we have Ceratosaurus
We have Marshosaurus, Stokesosaurus, so a lot of a carnivorous dinosaurs and in the
herbivorous dinosaurs we have our
Barosaurus, our Camptosaurus, Stegosaurus
but they're definitely the minority and
we are the repository for them
because we have them in our collection space here
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my name is Carrie Levitt-Bussian and I'm
the paleontology Collections Manager
here at the Natural History Museum of
Utah
and we're in the Cleveland-Lloyd aisles
because everything in both of these
cabinets all the way down both of these
rows are from Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry
Over 12,000 bones have been found at
Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry and we
have the majority of the bones found in
that site
As the land management agency, our
responsibility is not only to the
fossils and the natural history on the
ground, but what happens to these objects
after they're collected by museums. And
so we work closely with many natural
history museums to ensure that these
fossils are available for future generations
So, it's really awesome about this
collection is that we are on the
University of Utah campus, and so we have students that research the fossils here
We have professors having field
trips here that they can see the fossils
We actually have student interns that
come and work with me in collections
We are a research institution and so we
have people- researchers- come from all
over the world, come and study our
fossils here
So, what type of research has been done
with with these fossils from Cleveland-Lloyd here?
Yeah, so it's really neat
these have actually been histologically analyzed
So, what that means is someone
has taken this bone, cut it in half and
made that section into a thin section to
look at under a microscope
Kind of like what we have here, and you can tell a lot of information about the animal by cutting it up
You can tell how old it
was when it died, how old it was when it reached
sexual maturity, if it was warm-blooded
or cold-blooded
This is some of the follow-up work that's done by researchers here at the Museum or
researchers that come and visit the
collections to use these specimens?
Yes, and since we have this slide collection, we can actually loan these out to to
people all over the world so this
specimen may get used over and over again
by many researchers; it's not a
one-time deal and so who knows...
...someone 50 years from now may have a new question, and this slide may provide the
information to answer that question
Absolutely! So I have a lot of favorite specimens from Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry
my favorite I think is the Allosaurus leg bone that actually has amethyst inside of it
so that mineralization process is truly
spectacular
So, each fossil actually has a number on
it, or in this case two numbers on it
and that number actually gets linked in the
database to all the supplemental
material that we have: the preparation
sheets, the field notes, the field photos
everything gets linked to that number
and we keep track of that in the
database and so this way we can ensure
that it was collected legally, and tie it
back to the appropriate land agency was
found on
So, only about 1% of the specimens that
are in a museum ever goes on display
and it actually takes a long time of the
fossil's journey from when you excavate
it in the ground to being on display in
our Museum. So, sometimes it takes years
to even excavate it out of the ground,
and then we have to bring it back to our
prep lab, open it up, clean it up, glue it
back together, and then it either goes on display
or it comes up here in
collections to be protected in this environment
Museum displays like this are really
important, because they bring fossils
that have been found on public land to
the museum, and showcase them in the museum
Anybody can come here to see it
and what it's doing is showcasing what
might have happened at Cleveland-Lloyd
Dinosaur Quarry
So, I have a barosaurus, the sauropod-- the long-neck long-tail guy behind me-- and it's being
attacked by a herd of Allosaurus
fragilis, which is Utah State fossil
and we have both subadults, there's even a subadult on the back of the barosaurus
and hopefully encourage people
to ask questions, what might have happened
and maybe to get themselves
down to Cleveland-Lloyd because it's one
of the only dinosaur digs that you can
actually visit and see people digging up the dinosaur bones
It's always really
cool because, when we're working in the
buildings, and we're excavating or
mapping or anything else, I think it's
really awesome that we can kind of
converse with the visitors as they're coming in
We can answer those questions they
have because right now it's like
you coming in there's just bones everywhere, and so it's like, hey what am I looking at?
And then we can sit there and talk
with them about what they're actually
looking at, and how, potentially, it got
there
