SALT LAKE CITY (KUTV) — Utah Army National Guard aviators helped recover rare dinosaur fossils from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in June, providing airlift support to scientists from the Natural History Museum of Utah and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
Among the discoveries was a nearly complete skeleton of a baby duck-billed dinosaur excavated by researchers from the Natural History Museum of Utah.
The mission involved UH-60 Black Hawk and UH-72 Lakota helicopters assigned to the Utah National Guard’s 2-211th Aviation Regiment, along with a CH-47 Chinook from the Nevada National Guard’s 1-189th Aviation Regiment.
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“We excavated an entire skeleton of a baby duck-billed dinosaur, an animal that, from tip of the head to tip of the tail, was only 2 or 3 feet long,” said Dr. Randall Irmis, curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah.
Irmis said the fossil is exceptionally rare because the bones remained in their original life position, with the vertebrae, backbone and leg bones still connected. Although the dinosaur measured only a few feet long, the fossilized remains weigh more than 1,100 pounds because they are encased in rock.
“All the bones were still in life position, so they were still connected. If you imagine all the vertebrae in the tail and the backbone, all the leg bones were still connected in life position, and that’s really, really rare,” Irmis said.
Nevada National Guard aviators used a CH-47 Chinook helicopter to help scientists from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences extract a 4,000-pound fossilized ornithomimid, a theropod dinosaur with a resemblance to a modern ostrich.
The fossils will be taken to their respective museums, where they will be prepared, studied by researchers and eventually displayed for the public at the Natural History Museum of Utah.
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