(Grand) Stairway to Tyrannosaurs: A Call to Protect Our Public Lands

July 6, 2017 | Joshua Lively, PhD 2018

For the last seven field seasons, I’ve worked in the Cretaceous Kaiparowits Formation of southern Utah with paleontologists from the University of Utah (where I earned my master’s degree working on extinct turtles; Fig. 1), the Natural History Museum of Utah, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and the Bureau of Land Management. Those rocks are exposed in Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument (GSENM) and represent a time when Utah looked more like Louisiana… with dinosaurs. Many of those animals, which lived around 76 million years ago, are unique and found nowhere else on the planet. You can see many of them on display at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City (Fig. 2).

The May 2017 field season was a great one for our team. Half of our group prospected for new fossil localities in the middle of the Kaiparowits Formation. Prospecting involves hiking for miles and miles, staring at the ground, looking for fossils weathering out of the rock. Sometimes, we find a few interesting bones that lead to little else, like the associated fossils I found this year (Fig. 3). On rare days, you make great discoveries, like the one monument paleontologist Dr. Alan Titus made a few years ago. The other half of our field crew worked to excavate his find – a partially articulated tyrannosaur skeleton that may be the most complete ever discovered in the monument (Fig. 4). Our team worked to expose and extract large chunks of the tail, trunk, shoulder blade, and both legs. Then on the second-to-last day, we even started to expose the skull! Though we accomplished a lot on this trip, excavation of large animals like this can take months to complete.

For nearly a quarter of my life, I have had the opportunity to personally experience the fossils, geology, and scenic beauty (Fig. 5) found within the boundaries of GSENM. Last year, we celebrated the 20^th anniversary of the monument with a science forum in Kanab and Escalante, Utah. Unlike your typical scientific conference, this was a chance for scientists to share our research with the public in southern Utah. The talks and fieldtrips were packed, and one of my big take-aways was that paleontology is only a small part of the research going on in the monument. There were talks from other geoscientists, archaeologists, zoologists, botanists, social scientists, and even acoustics scientists highlighting diverse research projects going on within the monument. Grand Staircase is truly a multi-faceted landscape that protects and manages a plethora of resources.

At a time of year when we all feel great pride in all things USA, I’m very concerned about something quintessentially American: our national monuments and other public lands. Through executive order, the president has called for a review of national monuments established within the last 21 years, with an eye toward reducing their size or eliminating them all together. That includes Grand Staircase. There are some politicians in Salt Lake City and Washington, D.C. that have accused this and other monuments as being “federal land-grabs” that lock up resources and limit land use. Those of us that work in and around the monument can tell you that’s far from reality. The Bureau of Land Management oversees many uses for the land. Each year, the monument draws hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world to the small towns of southern Utah to hike, bike and photograph the unspoiled landscapes. Additionally, local ranchers can graze their cattle in GSENM for pennies on the dollar compared to what they would pay if the area was privately held. Monuments are inherently multi-use because they preserve many different resources, and GSENM is no different. Disagreements are always going to arise when it comes to how those resources are managed, and those can be resolved through earnest dialogue. But above all else, we need to remember that our national monuments and parks are more than just “federal” land. That land belongs to ALL AMERICANS. Thinking about reducing or eliminating public land in the US feels as un-American as melting down the Liberty Bell or burning the Declaration of Independence. Wouldn’t you like to preserve and protect these resources for the enjoyment of all Americans, and the generations to come?

 

If this short post has piqued your interest and PATRIOTISM, visit https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=DOI-2017-0002-0001 and leave a comment in support of preserving Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument as is. Comments are due by 11:59 PM Eastern on July 10^th.

 

If you want to learn more about paleontological research in Grand Staircase, see this National Geographic story about some of our colleagues: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2014/05/utah-dinosaurs/miller-text