Dinosaur boneyard

VERNAL, Utah --- Local legend has it that cowboys, sheep herders and trappers long knew about the huge fossilized bones that regularly surfaced from the ancient rock underlying Utah's dinosaur country.

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Associated Press

Split Mountain is seen, located 20 miles outside of Vernal, UT.

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Associated Press

The dinosaur rock wall, which contains hundreds of fossils, is to be found inside the temporarily closed visitors center.

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Associated Press

Although the visitors center is closed, there is plenty to see at Dinosaur National Monument. The way erosion has exposed prehistoric bones for public view makes this park unique among all dinosaur sites in the world. American Indians who lived in the area about 1,000 years ago left colorful reminders of their presence.

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Associated Press

The dinosaur rock wall, which contains hundreds of fossils, is to be found inside the temporarily closed visitors center.

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Associated Press

Split Mountain, which is 20 miles outside of Vernal, Utah, is part of the Dinosaur National Monument. Visitors to the National Park in Utah and Colorado will find fossils amid spectacular scenery.

Not until steel magnate Andrew Carnegie learned of the bones, however, did Vernal and the surrounding Ashley Valley get the nation's attention 100 years ago. Now Vernal, a Western outpost whose wide streets are lined with energy, mining and agricultural businesses, makes a business of its bones. It's home to a large dinosaur museum and is the base for a National Park Service site at a bone quarry Carnegie established in 1909.

Carnegie's bone quarry is the central dinosaur-related attraction of the area. Situated 20 miles from Vernal, it's part of Dinosaur National Monument, a 210,000-acre park with rocky and rippled canyonlands in Utah and Colorado.

The park is best known for its visitors center, with a wall of 1,500 fossilized bones from 11 types of dinosaurs. In 2005, the visitors center, which is atop Carnegie's bone quarry, was closed because of severe structural problems.

It's not expected to open again until 2012, but there is still plenty to see. A bed of fossilized bones extends outside the shuttered building. A trail nearby passes fossils eroded from a cliff, including a string of vertebrae, a large femur and a humerus.

The park has a temporary visitors center with fossils and a gift shop featuring giant replica dinosaur bones to take home.

And there is a lot more at the park than bones. Fremont Indians who lived near the park's two rivers about 1,000 years ago left behind petroglyphs (patterns that are chipped or carved into the rock) and pictographs (drawings or paintings on the rock). They can be seen at remote sites accessible by foot or car.

The park is also spectacular in itself, a rolling bed of multicolored rock cliffs and formations showing the movement of the earth over hundreds of millions of years.

"The cliffs and sculptured forms are sometimes smooth, sometimes fantastically craggy, always massive, and they have a peculiar capacity to excite the imagination," wrote author Wallace Stegner in a book of essays, Dinosaur , that he edited in 1955 when there was talk of converting the park's Yampa and Green canyons into a reservoir for a hydroelectric dam. "The effect on the human spirit is neither numbing nor awesome, but infinitely peaceful."

Dinosaur bones are found on every continent. But Utah's Uinta Basin is unique because of the way that the rock shows the ancient remains. Originally the rocks, formed from lake and floodplain sediment, lay flat. Over millions of years, the movement of the earth pushed the massive stone layers until they now point at the sky. Erosion has worn away the rock, revealing the bones.

The result: "There's just no other place anywhere on the planet where they're just so beautifully exposed for the public to see. It's the most famous place to see dinosaurs still in their host rock anywhere in the world," said Jim Kirkland, the Utah state paleontologist, who works for the Utah Geological Survey. "There is no place as spectacular as Dinosaur."