Sometimes, visitors come to the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site expecting to see the towering skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex or Brontosaurus.
This particular museum, however, focuses on a completely different era of Utah’s prehistory, tens of millions of years before the T-Rex ruled the ancient world. What makes it unique is that it’s built over the top of 200-million-year-old fossilized dinosaur footprints that remain embedded in the ground where they were found.
“Our guides are the ones that help convey that and just talk about how cool it actually is,” Executive Director Diana Call said. “Because definitely we have people that are disappointed.”
In all, the museum is home to thousands of tracks stacked in dozens of layers of rock, Call said as she walked past the site’s centerpiece — an exposed layer of sandstone imprinted with large footprints made by two-legged carnivores, such as the dilophosaurus that’s displayed as a colorful statue with its feet in the tracks.
This museum is relatively new. The footprint fossils it’s built around were discovered in 2000 when a local farmer accidentally unearthed them. The museum opened five years later.
Being a small organization in a small-but-growing city brings its share of challenges. It’s only able to support a staff of 11 right now. Its primary source of funding — visitor admissions — has risen and fallen over the past few years, especially early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the biggest challenge is that it’s running out of space.
Even though Call’s team regularly partners with other organizations, such as the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, to excavate and prepare fossils from around southwest Utah, the museum doesn’t have room to hold them.
“We prepare a lot of the things that eventually go to other places,” she said. “So our vision would be that we would actually be able to have a lot more of those collections stay here.”
That’s why the museum is holding a fundraising concert it’s dubbed Jams Through the Jurassic. It wants to build support to eventually add storage for its fossil collection, open new exhibits and find more ways to bring the region’s scientific wonders into the community.
Prehistoric impressions can be found throughout southwest Utah and around the world. What makes this site stand out is its dense concentration of prints from dinosaurs, early crocodiles and even tiny mammals at a time when Earth was recovering from the end-Triassic extinction event. They all came to this spot because, 200 million years ago, it was the muddy edge of a large, shallow saline lake.
Unlike fossilized skeletons, these tracks offer scientists a glimpse into how dinosaurs moved and behaved. Some of the world’s best-preserved swim tracks, for instance, show how paddling dino claws left long scratch marks on the lake bottom. The museum’s rarest set of impressions — affectionately called butt prints — prove that dinosaurs crouched to sit when they rested on the ancient lake’s shores.
“It's one of the most important early Jurassic sites in North America, particularly for footprints,” Call said. “We're learning a lot more about what the dinosaurs are doing when they're running around alive.”
The Feb. 29 concert in St. George is the museum’s first big fundraiser since its 20th anniversary in 2020. Previous efforts have helped the museum expand the visitor experience in tangible ways — installing a boardwalk over some of the dinosaur tracks, painting a large wraparound mural that illustrates life at the ancient lake and renovating the fossil preparation lab with a window for guests to watch scientists and students at work.
Call said the plan now is to make the museum’s fundraiser an annual event to continue expanding what it can offer the community. Her vision would be to add more interactive exhibits that answer questions like how fossils are made, how rocks form or how scientists figure out a site’s age.
“We kind of touch on geology here, but we would love to focus more heavily on geology. We'd also like to … have biology as well as archeology,” Call said. “So that all of those things are on display and you can interact with all those things eventually.”
She would also like to create more resources for local educators. The museum started dipping its toes into that a few years ago by loaning out kits to schools with rocks and replica fossils, along with lesson plans to guide the instruction.
Shauna Williams, Washington County School District’s high-ability program coordinator and elementary science specialist, said this type of hands-on learning can resonate with everyone.
“The kids love it because it's not your typical lesson. Teachers love it because it's ready to go and it's hands-on and it's not just theory and a PowerPoint. There are things that the kids can touch and work with.”
Growing their partnership is especially vital in St. George, Williams said, because southwest Utah doesn’t have the same kinds of large science organizations that provide educational enrichment opportunities for students in bigger cities — think Salt Lake City’s Hogle Zoo, Draper’s Loveland Living Planet Aquarium or Lehi’s Thanksgiving Point.
As it stands, Williams said the museum’s kits often don’t end up being used because teachers don’t know how, so more training events for educators would be a big help. Then, teachers could use the students’ interest in these hands-on activities to springboard into other lessons, such as reading or writing activities based on this science.
“Making connections to where we live, making connections to what we saw at the museum and bringing that back to the classroom and trying to use it in a consistent way,” Williams said. “Our kids would just benefit so much from that type of learning.”
For Call, that fits right in with her long-term plan for the museum’s role in the community.
There are other big needs related to the actual paleontology work, too. Some additional tracks in the ground behind the museum are currently protected by wooden boxes and could use a more permanent shelter. There’s also a piece of city-owned land across the street that likely holds even more tracks underground, and the museum would like to excavate and preserve it.
Museum staff even found a dinosaur vertebrae on the ground’s surface at another site nearby, but they haven’t gone back to excavate yet because there is no place to store any fossilized bones they might dig up.
But if the museum’s funding can grow enough, Call said, maybe someday it might even be home to one of those tall dino skeletons all its own.
“Hopefully we would find and be able to name a new dinosaur,” Call said. “Fingers crossed.”
