A Day of Rest in Vernal July 14

Sunday, July 14. Today was Dinosaur Exploration Day for the Roses. We started with brunch at Golden Corral, then went to the dinosaur museum in downtown. We took pictures and read plaques, watched a movie, and did a all the stuff you do in a museum. We also got information about traveling about twenty miles to the Dinosaur National Monument, which was the highlight of the day. We were shuttled up to a building from the visitors center, where an solid wall of rock with hundreds of real dinosaur fossils was enclosed. It was quite unique to see these exposed, 150 million year old bones, right there, still in the rock. The rock was a river bottom  all those years ago where the animals went for water, and were presumably drowned by a massive flood, and they stacked up like a logjam. There were bones of over 400 dinosaurs exposed in an area that was raised up by the formation of the mountains years after there death and burial in sediment. After a full day of being educated about the occurrences of millions of years ago, we chilled for the rest of the evening, and planned our next visits, to Flaming Gorge, and Cheyenne, for Cheyenne Frontier Days.

An afternoon in the Vernal Natural History Museum

Mike makes a new friend

Don't ask me what they are.....

Cute guy

One of the large rooms that had real fossils

Spine and ribs

They even had an outdoor exhibit with all the following dinosaur models

Mike and his friend the raptor

Mike, Buddy and Woolly Mammoth!

Mike with one of his friends.

They even had a pond with fish and dinosaurs!

Not to worry, it didn't carry Mike away!

Mike, Buddy and Pam at the museum!

Then we drove to the Dinosaur National Monument!

The following pictures are of the wall that contained hundreds of dinosaur bones.

This is the only skull and neck visible on the wall.  Skulls are very rare since the bone is thin and often disintegrates during fossilization. 

This is a thigh bone that is next to Mike!

A wall full of fossils!  Ha Ha!!!

Does this foot print look familiar????  Kinda like the prints that Mike and I saw??

It is a "new" dinosaur, meaning it was recently discovered in the Moab area!!!

On our way back to the motor home, we had to stop at a bike shop (Mike likes to go in a look around), but unfortunately it the shop was closed.  But the shop had cool bike statues outside!