Dinosaur National Monument allows its visitors to explore prehistory through a hands-on experience. People worldwide travel to this place to experience this iconic park located on the Utah and Colorado border, where dinosaur evidence has been preserved for millions of years. Some people may refer to this place as the Dinosaur National Park, but technically, this site is a national monument.

Spanning over 200,000 acres, the iconic Dinosaur National Monument is located in Northeastern Utah and features attractions in both Utah and Colorado. The incredible amount of dinosaur footprints, fossils, and other prehistoric “Dinosaurland.” This site is proud to be among the top tourist destination in the world of prehistory and dinosaur enthusiasts.

Dinosaur Monument History

In 1909, Earl Douglas discovered how important this land would eventually be. Earl searched for fossils on behalf of a museum he was working for, and then he found a deposit of several prehistoric fossils. To continue searching the land and studying the fossils, Earl established a quarry and continued excavating.

Earl and his team eventually unearthed numerous fossils, establishing this area around Vernal as one of the hotspots for paleontological research. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson officially made the Dinosauland fossil beds a national monument. Nowadays, this site has been developed to allow visitors to see the dinosaurs’ evidence at this site while also learning about what life was like millions of years ago. The Dinosaur National Monument is more than a fun dinosaur park; it is a piece of prehistory.

Besides all the fun areas, the Dinosaur National Monuments offer evidence of past human cultures. While visiting this Dinosaurland, you can also spend some time exploring the many ancient petroglyphs (carvings in stone) and pictographs (paintings in stone) left by an ancient civilization -the Fermont people- that inhabited this land before the 14th century.