It’s a race against time 200 million years in the making.
In a patch of red dirt between a batch of St. George homes and a Taco Bell, a couple dozen scientists and volunteers chip away at giant slabs of stone searching for signs of ancient life.
“This is some bougie field work,” paleontologist Jaleesa Buchwitz said with a laugh. “Water is close at hand. The hospital is only five minutes away. This is luxurious.”
What they don’t have is the luxury of time. In early May, the city will turn this empty lot — conveniently across the street from the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site museum — into an electrical substation. So, the goal is to salvage as many fossils as possible before the deadline.
Buchwitz, the museum’s deputy curator and collections manager, said there are plenty of reasons this site demands their attention. And it highlights the juxtaposition of St. George’s status as both a hotbed for prehistoric relics and a rapidly growing boomtown.
This roughly one-acre lot and everything else around here used to be underwater roughly 200 million years ago. That’s when much of southwest Utah and northwest Arizona was covered by a shallow lake filled with fish and surrounded by large ferns and trees that thrived in a subtropical climate. It created a perfect recipe for fossil preservation.
“Imagine all these meat-eating dinosaurs hanging around on the shores of this big lake, fishing and swimming and leaving all their really nice footprints in the mud,” Buchwitz said as she motioned toward the pale green rock layer that was the ancient lake bed.
Scientists don’t know too much about this particular era, she said, but they realize it’s important. Its fossil record includes the extinction event that ended the Triassic period and the rise of dinosaurs during the Jurassic.
So, the remains lodged here might hold the key to discovering what life was like back then — or maybe even help identify a new species.
“We were in the middle of updating exhibits and lots of things at the museum that are obviously on hold because of this,” Buchwitz said. “And that's OK because being outside and playing in the dirt is the best part of this job.”
It has created an urgent situation, though. Museum staff knew the city planned to build here someday but they didn’t realize just how soon until recently.
“It's hard to prepare for something when we don't fully know the timeline. That's kind of the ‘crisis’ part is getting people to come help.”
Because of the museum’s small staff and budget, there was no way they could quarry the site by early May on their own. So, they put out a call to the community, and to their surprise, dozens have shown up to help.
Some even brought heavy machinery. Ammon Bateman owns a local excavation company and got a text from his uncle about the museum’s plea. He was happy to take a break from digging septic systems and water lines.
“Good change of pace from just working 24/7,” he said from the seat of his bright orange mini excavator. “Get to dig up dinosaurs. You can't say you do that all the time.”
Another of the roughly 20 volunteers here, Hannah Pettijohn, cracked open a grapefruit-sized rock with a hammer. She then scoured the exposed interior for reddish iron concretions — the telltale signs of something worth keeping.
“Alas, nothing,” she said as she tossed the fossil-less fragments into a pile behind her. “But that's pretty normal. That's what makes finding something new really, really exciting.”
She had already mined some notable discoveries, though, including fossilized poop and a dinosaur tooth. For her, the experience has unearthed a new layer of appreciation for her home.
“This is where I live. This is my backyard, so being able to find the history that used to be here is so important to me,” Pettijohn said. “These kinds of fossils aren't all over the world, so the fact that we have them at all is really, really special.”
Nearby, volunteer and retired geologist Craig Morgan hasn’t found anything too sizable yet — just some fish bones and scales — but it’s enough to keep him going.
“You realize that, ‘Gee, no human in the world has ever seen this, and I'm the first one,’” he said as he scraped flaky layers of rock with a putty knife. “It's wonderful discovery work.”
In just a couple of weeks, the makeshift crew had already dug up around 200 specimens, Buchwitz said. Many of the pieces surprised even the scientists. There have been rare plant fossils, unusual tracks left by swimming dinosaurs and a tooth that might belong to a yet-unknown crocodile-like species.
“We've probably exposed maybe half of the area that we need to be working,” Buchwitz said. “So, we’re at least going to double how many specimens we’re collecting.”
That means they’ll need a lot more volunteers to finish the job. And eventually, they’ll need someplace to store all the new finds, the largest of which weighs around 100 pounds.
The museum doesn’t have that kind of space currently, Buchwitz said, so many of the pieces are being kept outside its building. They’ll figure out a more permanent solution later, perhaps with help from some of the money they’re raising to support the dig.
Then she’ll embark on the painstaking journey of cataloging and preparing this sudden windfall of fossils.
“This is, like, the rest of my career,” Buchwitz said. “This is decades of work.”
For now, though, her team is focused on packing up the finds as quickly as possible — and savoring the chance to rescue this piece of Utah history before it’s lost to time.
