ST. GEORGE, Utah — Inside a small lab in St. George, paleontologists and volunteers are racing against time. Every fossil they study dates back hundreds of millions of years, yet their time to recover them is limited.
Among those leading the charge is Hunter Carter, lab manager at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site. Carter, a native of Enterprise, Utah, has temporarily shut down the lab to focus on an urgent excavation across the street at a site known as Dinosaur Crossing.
The City of St. George is set to build an electrical substation on the site, and paleontologists have until May to recover as many prehistoric relics as possible.
“We have to try and process this stuff a little faster than you usually would,” Carter said. “There’s a lot of significant stuff in the ground here, and we’re just trying to get it out as safely as possible and get as much of it as we can.”
The dig has drawn researchers and enthusiasts from across the country, including Clarissa Sadler, a local rock hound, and Michael Grenier, a paleontologist with the Rochester Academy of Science.
“If the smallest fossils aren’t found now,” Grenier explained, “they get washed down into the river and carried out to the Colorado and then out to sea. Very few of them are actually recovered.”
The excavation has already yielded groundbreaking finds, including dinosaur teeth and tiny freshwater shark teeth belonging to a previously undiscovered species.
“This is a new species of shark that has yet to be described,” Carter said, referring to fossils from the Early Jurassic Lake Whitmore.
One of the biggest finds of the dig occurred just last week when a couple from northern Utah, on their very first fossil-hunting trip, uncovered a massive dinosaur tooth. Initially thought to belong to a Dilophosaurus, further examination revealed it was from an entirely new, unnamed species.
“It’s a dinosaur very similar to Dilophosaurus, but it is not Dilophosaurus,” Carter explained. “Since it’s a new species, we get to name it. I haven’t thought about that yet, but it would probably be funny to name it something about electricity since we’re doing this in a substation.”
Back in the lab, fossils continue to pile up from the excavation site. Despite the team’s best efforts, Carter acknowledges that many fossils will remain buried beneath the substation.
“It’ll probably be many, many years before we see all of the things that we’re pulling out of the quarry across the road get fully prepped,” he said. “Just because of the nature of the way it works.”
The painstaking process of fossil preparation is exemplified by one researcher who has spent a year meticulously working on a single fish fossil using a small needle.
“That’s her project, and it takes an incredible amount of patience,” Carter said. “And to me, it’s a very rewarding thing.”
As the clock ticks toward May, Carter and his team remain focused on preserving as much of the prehistoric past as possible.
