Based on careful study of fossilized teeth, scientists Keegan Melstrom and Randall Irmis at the Natural History Museum of Utah at the University of Utah have found that multiple ancient groups of crocodyliforms—the group including living and extinct relatives of crocodiles and alligators—were not the carnivores we know today, as reported in the journal Current […]

Fossils of a new genus and species of an ankylosaurid dinosaur—Akainacephalus johnsoni—have been unearthed in the Kaiparowits Formation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), and are revealing new details about the diversity and evolution of this group of armored dinosaurs.  Expected to look like other North American Late Cretaceous ankylosaurid dinosaurs with smooth bony armor […]

A remarkable new fossilized skeleton of a tyrannosaur discovered in the Bureau of Land Management’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) in southern Utah was airlifted by helicopter Sunday, Oct. 15, from a remote field site, and delivered to the Natural History Museum of Utah where it will be uncovered, prepared and studied. The fossil is […]

In the 250-million-year evolutionary history of turtles, scientists have seen nothing like the pig nose of a new species of extinct turtle discovered in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by a team from the Natural History Museum of Utah. “It’s one of the weirdest turtles that ever lived,” said Joshua Lively, who described the new species […]

For more than 30 million years after dinosaurs first appeared, they remained inexplicably rare near the equator, where only a few small-bodied meat-eating dinosaurs eked out a living. The age-long absence of big plant-eaters at low latitudes is one of the great, unanswered questions about the rise of the dinosaurs. And now the mystery has […]