Unitah House of Natural History. Vernal, Utah

In Vernal, Utah before leaving for Colorado, we visited the Unitah House of Natural History. It was a museum with dinosaur, rock, plant, and other prehistoric fossils.

Here is a replica of one of the most complete fossils of a camrasaurus, a sauropod (long-necked, long tailed dinosaur) found in the world. I don't remember where the original piece is, but it was discovered in 1919 near Vernal.

This is a real allosaurus fossil (more explained about this species later) found in 1990. The rock that this fossil is embedded in weighs about 6,000 pounds and was air lifted by helicopter out of the excavation site in 1994.

The museum had a couple fun projects to do, like learning how to identify fossils and brushing them out of basins filled with "authentic" rubber dirt.

This section of the museum that we were in had a few exhibits of how an excavation site looks, and what tools they used, etc. Also another exhibit wall, with the guidance of a sign showed us how to identify what are actually fossils and what are just petrified wood, or a simple rock. In the picture above I'm sitting next to an actual sauropod's femur bone. Its so big I would have thought it was just a rock.

Here is another skeleton of an allosaurus. These are thought of as the bad boys of the late Jurassic Period. They were theropods, carnivores with powerful hind legs that could chase down prey very easily. By measuring their fossilized tracks, the strides turned out to be 6 and a half feet long.

This is what an allosaurus looked like in the flesh.

Here is more reason to be glad that you weren't alive during the Jurassic period. In this glass case, the top claw is the allosaurus's back claw, and at the bottom is the tiny but dangerous ripping teeth, and the middle is a front claw measuring at least 4 or 5 inches long. I wonder which I would rather be chased by, this monster or an Alaskan grizzly bear? Fortunately, neither has ever happened to me!

This case contained the skulls of animals that came after the Jurassic Period. Contained within was a fossil of a 1/4 inch long jaw of a primitive horse that was perhaps only a foot tall at that time.

At last, a saber toothed cat! This fossilized skull was found in the La Brea tar pits in California. The saber toothed cats went extinct 11,000 years ago.

These glowing rocks are called Flourescent Minerals. Inside the minerals are chemicals that react to invisible (to humans at least) ultraviolet rays that causes the minerals to emit light. Inside the room was a switch so when the room is lighted, you're looking at what seems like ordinary rocks, then you flip the switch and the room is pitch-black and now you're looking at glowing rocks! Very cool.

The famous Woolly Mammoth! They can be 14 feet tall at the shoulder, simply huge animals. And to think that back then, humans used to hunt them with puny spears! Most woolly mammoth bones and carcasses have been found in North America, northern Eurasia, and Siberia. They went extinct about 10,000 BC, while some smaller versions of the woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until 1700 BC. I have read somewhere else that the longest woolly mammoth tusk found was 16 feet long and weighed 208 pounds.