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Two ‘New’ Dinosaurs Discovered in Grand Staircase-Escalante Won’t Be the Last

By Christian Probasco, 10-13-10

Kosmoceratops richardsoni, the smaller of the two new horned certopsids recently dug up in what was ancient Laramidia, a hotbed of modern dino discoveries. Drawing courtesy of Mark Hallett.

Spending time exploring the gray shale badlands in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, where two new horned ceratopsids were unearthed, can leave a more-than-casual observer a bit unimpressed. I first visited “The Blues,” as the locals call the area, with Doctor Alan Titus, a paleontologist who was involved in the discovery of the new species.

Here’s how I described the place in my book ”Highway 12”:

In terms of scenic value, The Blues are mediocre; they’re badlands but not the colorful variety. In fact, they’re a uniform, drab allcharite-gray, and the strata are slumped and streaked with brown stains and studded with pinyon and juniper and wiry saltbrush. Most travelers on Highway 12 breeze past the ugly gray slopes without giving them a second thought but Alan’s eyes light up as we approach them. This landscape is currently ground-zero for worldwide paleontological research.

But maybe I was too hard on the fossiliferous Blues. It’s true there’s a unique paleontological character of the dusty, gray slopes. With every rainstorm, massive fossils break from the eroded surface like splinters working their way out of skin.

North America during the Cretaceous. Laramidia covered the West Coast and spread toward the intermountain West. Map courtesy of Ron Blakey, Northern Arizona University Geology Dept.

Titus showed me where a turtle shell, vacated about 75 million years ago, had rolled down onto the trail after a hard storm. He showed me a hadrosaur femur sticking out of a boulder. It was perfect. Titus seemed to be only half-interested in it, as if it were commonplace.

I was impressed. The hadrosaur was a big, duck-billed, flat-faced herbivore which galumphed around Utah during the Cretaceous Period. It weighed about 5 tons and could run about as fast as a motor scooter. Fossilized samples recovered from the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) show its skin was cracked into small polygons like dry earth.

During the Cretaceous, the high desert of southern Utah was a swamp on the edge of the continent of Laramidia, separated from what is now the eastern North American Continent by a sea.

In an e-mail interview, Andrew Farke, a curator at the Raymond M. Alf Museum in Claremont, Calif., who shared in the discovery of the two horned species, compared the Cretaceous environment to Florida today.

“It would have been hot and muggy,” he wrote, “with some fantastic beachfront property.”

Mark Loewen, another discoverer, likened southern Laramidia to the Louisiana Delta, adding that back from the coast there were plenty of “braided, anastomosing distributary channels…extensive floodplains…backswamps and oxbow ponds” filled with “araucarian trees and other gymnosperms” above “cycads and small dicot trees,” while the swamps were “dominated by cypress trees…aquatic and epiphytic ferns along with giant duckweed-like aquatic plants…”

Skull of the big-nosed Gypnosaurus monumentensis, discovered in the Grand Staircase National Monument. Photo courtesy of Utah Museum of Natural History.

Right. More importantly, there were dragons slinking about, including the vicious Velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame, the familiar Tyrannosaurus, and behemothic armored titanosaurs, some of which may have weighed more than 100 tons. And there were lesser known hideosities such as 35-foot-long “alligatoroids.”

Paleontologists working in the monument have discovered other inhabitants of Laramidia. They dug up a “robust…duck-billed,” hefty, goofy-looking dinosaur named Gryposaurus monumentensis in the early aughts and also unearthed the only known Hagryphus giganteus, a 10-foot-long “Oviraptosaur,” a.k.a. a ”giant four-footed, bird-like god of the western desert” which had “massive endentulous jaws and extensively pneumatized skulls” according to Wikipedia. Farke describes it as “a plant-eating cousin of animals like Velociraptor.”

Farke, Loewen, Titus and the rest of the crew are trying to figure out why Laramidia was so chock-full of big hungry brutes. Current estimates put the number of species that were rhino-sized or larger at about 2 dozen. As Loewen asks, “How could so many different varieties of giant animals have co-existed on such a small chunk of real estate?”

Perhaps Cretaceous animals were more loving and tolerant. Perhaps dinosaurs had a reptilian metabolism and didn’t need nearly as much caloric input as that of mammals. Alligators can survive comfortably on about a meal a week and can go for months without eating at all, lowering their metabolism and meditating on the bogy nature of the universe until some hapless target of opportunity stumbles by.

Farke tells me the two new ceratopsids had a limited geographic range and were probably a short-lived species.

One thing’s certain: The two fringed swamp-dwellers won’t be the last big discoveries to come out of the national monument. Loewen wrote there were “at least seven or so new dinosaurs to report in the near future from the GSENM.” Farke also promises the announcement of another major discovery any day now, though he says he “can’t go into detail because there are more senior investigators working hard on writing them up for scientific publication.”

Stay tuned. There’s more monsters yet uncovered in Laramidia.

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