Southern Utah dinosaur discovery now on display in 3D

Southern Utah dinosaur discovery now on display in 3D

(The Raymond M. Alf Museum)


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KANE COUNTY — Dinosaur bones discovered in southern Utah by a California High School student in 2009 are finally ready for public viewing.

Then 17-year-old Kevin Terris, along with a team of other students lead by paleontologist Andrew Farke, discovered a bevy of bones during a paleontology ‘prospecting’ trek through remote wilderness in southern Utah in 2009.

“At first I was interested in seeing what the initial piece of bone sticking out of the rock was,” Terris said. “When we exposed the skull, I was ecstatic.”

The team discovered what they would later deduce to be the nearly intact skeletal structure of a small dinosaur, a Parasaurolophus, pronounced “PAIR-uh-SORE-AH-luf-us”.

Terris was attending The Webb Schools, a science oriented high school in Claremont, California. The school is home to the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, the only accredited museum in the United States residing on a high school campus. Students work in tandem with professors to curate and prepare exhibits of paleontological discoveries.

“We’re a unique high school campus,” Farke said. “The students are involved in every aspect of the museum process.”

The discovery in southern Utah was one of the largest the school and museum had ever come across.

“In the case of the discovery of this specimen, we knew that is was going to be something fairly big,” Farke said.

Above: A painting of "Joe" the baby Parasaurolophus, by Lukas 
Panzarin.
Above: A painting of "Joe" the baby Parasaurolophus, by Lukas Panzarin.

It took paleontology crews over a year to organize a return to the site to begin the excavation. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Farke and his team had to apply for special permits in order to extract the bones from the area and take them back to California.

Once the bones made it to California, teams worked for over 1,300 hours to reconstruct the skeleton of the young Parasaurolophus, or “Joe” as their new discovery was nicknamed.

Farke said once the skeleton was assembled, paleontologists digitally mapped the bones so those interested in viewing the dino could do so comprehensively from their own computers.

“One thing that we’re really excited about is that the dinosaur is digitally accessible to the world,” Farke said. “For those who can’t come to see it in person, you can look at the 3D images from anywhere in the world.”

Joe is thought to have been a young dinosaur, probably under a year old when he died. Farke said the skeleton was a groundbreaking discovery and that the bones were in pristine condition when found.

“It would have grown into an animal about 25 feet in diameter,” Farke said “Finding a young skeleton with a small skull like this was incredible. The bones were still in their life position.”


For those who can't come to see it in person, you can look at the 3D images from anywhere in the world.

–Andrew Farke


Kevin Terris worked with his professors throughout the excavation and preparation process. He’s now attending the University of Montana in Bozeman.

After four years of preparation, Joe is finally on display at the Alf Museum in Claremont. For those not able to visit the museum, Farke said viewing the bones in 3D on the website is "almost" just as good as seeing them in person.

“You can see angles you can’t see in real life,” Farke said. “People who come to the museum go home and look up the 3D scans online to get a better view.”

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UtahScience
Robynn Garfield

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