- When you dig up a skeleton, skeletons are sexy.

- [Liz] I'm sorry, what?

Please elaborate.

- They make great exhibits in museums, but those are the remains of dead animals.

They're static, they're unmoving things.

But the trace fossils, the footprints that we have here are much more active and dynamic.

- [Liz] Many people here are passionate about preserving these fragments of history, but there are challenges that threaten preservation.

- [Thomas] Geologically, it's a wonderful site.

You got most exciting features here, world-renowned features here, except people here don't know it.

- [Liz] That is until now.

I'm Liz Adeola and "This is Utah."

(upbeat music) It's amazing what we can learn from a few old bones.

Take this dinosaur fossil, for instance.

While it may look a bit drafty, in my opinion, don't you get a little cold?

(wind blowing) (jaw chattering) - [Liz] They help us see what existed hundreds of millions of years ago, and in Southern Utah, they're going a step further, uncovering trace fossils.

- [Diana] The most of what we have are the footprints.

- [Jerry] But we have the world's biggest collection of dinosaur swim tracks at the site made by meat-eating dinosaurs that went off into the lake as a concentrated flock or herd or whatever you wanna call it to pursue fish.

And that's a behavior that, you know, we attribute that kind of flocking behavior to birds or to a lot of mammals.

It's weird to think dinosaurs did something like that.

- [David] I found literally thousands of tracks.

- [Liz] Tracks that reveal the secret lives of some of your favorite prehistoric creatures.

(upbeat music continues) We'd like to give a special thank you to our sponsors.

Welcome to the St.

George Dinosaur Discovery Dig Site, once a popular spot where dinosaurs hung out millions of years ago.

- [Jerry] This site is a great example of trying to tell a story about what was happening at this spot 200 million years ago by introducing visitors, piece by piece to here's this piece of data, here's this piece of data, and this is how all those pieces come together and give us a bigger picture.

So was this like a huge recreational hot spot for dinosaurs?

- It was a lake beach, yeah.

It was that beach environment where we had large meat-eating dinosaurs going into the water to catch fish for food, and coming, going in and out and swimming in the lake.

We have traces of fishes and invertebrates like crayfishes and insects and things like that crawling around on the beach.

So it was a very active, dynamic ecosystem.

And the site preserves these fossils from a time that was just about a million years after a major extinction event.

So we're really sort of capturing the recovery of ecosystems after that event at this site.

- [Liz] It's now a hot spot for dino enthusiasts like Thomas Eckhardt.

- I have a good time digging.

That's the fun.

- [Liz] David Slauf.

- We're all kind of like honey badgers.

Once we find something, we're gonna get it out no matter how far we have to hike.

- [Liz] And Hannah Pettijohn.

- [Hannah] I'm really weird, though.

I actually wanna find lungfish teeth.

Lungfish, they're these really cool fish that are still around today.

They're actually able to kinda walk around on land a little bit, breathe a little bit of air.

Some of them can go inside of burrows and stuff.

(brush scraping) - [Hannah] I've always been into dinosaurs.

I saw "The Land Before Time" as a kid, was really into that.

- [Liz] Did it make you cry?

- Yeah, absolutely.

- [Liz] I was crying too.

- Little Foot was my favorite character so, you know, it's just how it was.

- [Liz] It was here that volunteers and workers took me under their wing, so to speak, sharing the unique secrets of the site and the best ways to uncover its mysteries.

(brush scraping) - [Jerry] St.

George just has an abundance of sedimentary rocks going from about 525 million years ago up until about 40 million years ago or so, and a lot of time in between.

And a lot of it is just full of fossils.

- [Diana] Dr.

Sheldon Johnson that was here in town, he was a local optometrist.

It was his farm, and he was just leveling to like sell the land or, you know, develop it, and then came on these dinosaur tracks and preserved them.

So he and his wife are the ones that raised the money and like donated the land to actually have a museum here.

- [Jerry] It's very unique compared to most museums elsewhere in the world since we concentrate primarily on trace fossils, which are fossils that were made by living animals rather than the remains of dead animals.

So the footprints and things like that were made by living organisms.

And we interpret those very differently than we do with bones and the types of fossils people typically go to museums to see.

- [Liz] While the focus here is to find and examine trace fossils, let's be honest, we are all just excited to find any sign of prehistoric life.

- [David] When you pull out a piece of rock and break it open and you find a large tooth in your hands of a theropod dinosaur, you're just thunderstruck with the possibilities of what was here and what was going on at the time.

(people chattering) (hammer clacking) - [Hannah] This is my backyard, right?

Knowing that there were animals wandering around here 200 million years ago, and I get to go find them and maybe be the first person to see their bones and stuff, like that's really, really cool.

I'm really excited about that.

- [David] It's crazy.

(gentle music) I never thought I'd be involved with it or be a volunteer, and it's completely become my passion.

- [Hannah] I found a lot of fish for sure, fish scales.

We found fish skeletons, but I've actually found a theropod, a meat-eating dinosaur tooth as well.

So that was pretty exciting.

- [Liz] What have you found so far?

- Not much.

(Liz and Thomas chuckling) That's the part of it, you know?

It's a lot of, you're moving a lot of rocks.

The key is not to miss anything.

That's the key.

But sometimes you find exciting things.

- [Kaydyn] These are both parts of fish skulls.

This one is likely a jawbone, and this one's likely what's called an operculum.

It's the covering of like the gills.

- Uh-huh.

- Mm-hm.

- And you just found this?

- Yeah, I just pulled these out.

- Oh my gosh.

- [Liz] So the bar is set.

Will I also discover a jawbone or some tooth from a prehistoric meat-eater that can be displayed at the museum across the street for generations to come?

In comes Deputy Curator, Jaleesa Buchwitz, with a reality check.

(tranquil music) - [Jaleesa] So these upper layers are where we're finding the dinosaur stuff.

So basically from here up.

Mostly dinosaur teeth, which is exciting and really cool.

I think the biggest dinosaur tooth we found is this big, which is really exciting.

(tranquil music continues) (brush scraping) - [Jaleesa] Yeah, so once you get it clean, you're like, "Oh, look, there's all these little iron concretions," where there are, either are fossils or there were fossils there.

I like to come in with an awl or a flathead screwdriver.

These are my favorite tools.

- [Liz] Ooh.

(Liz gasping) - [Jaleesa] Lift it up.

- [Liz] Wow!

- [Jaleesa] So there are some little scale concretions in there, nothing too terribly exciting in that piece.

- [Liz] I was excited!

- [Jaleesa] You should be.

(Liz and Jaleesa laughing) - [Liz] What percentage of what they find is the scales?

- [Jaleesa] Um.

Like 90.

- [Liz] Okay.

(both laugh) - [Liz] Expectations were lowered, but I'm still hoping for a diamond in the rough.

- [Jaleesa] So there's a little fish bone in there and, again, a little scale concretion right there.

- So it's mostly scales.

- [Liz] Found a fish bone, though.

Check that out.

(both chuckling) Oops.

Oh, no!

(chuckles) - [Liz] While I didn't find any museum-worthy pieces, I was able to help create a plaster jacket for a fossil.

(curious music) This goopy substance is actually burlap dipped in wet plaster.

It dries forming a hard shell that's stable enough for workers to move it to their lab.

- [Jerry] We have a dedicated cadre of volunteer preparators in the lab who are trained to sit there and literally move the rock grain by grain off the fossils under a microscope often.

And it can take thousands of hours to prepare some of these fossils.

And so it takes them years, you know, coming in once or twice a week to do that kind of thing.

- [Liz] Before any of these items can go on display.

- [Jaleesa] We have lots of kids who come out and want to be paleontologists.

- [Liz] Like Cory Kimber, who started volunteering as a pre-teen.

- Basically, my mom pulled up "Jurassic Park" one day when I was four years old.

I watched it, hooked ever since.

These animals, they lived so long ago, and the fact that we can know anything about them is just incredible.

- [Liz] But there was once a time when this site was in jeopardy.

- [Diana] The city actually owns the building and the land that we're on and the big blocks that are here.

- [Liz] In 2025, the city planned to open a substation right at the quarry.

- Several years ago, the city came to us and told us that was a potential site for it, so we were aware and were just in communications with them, letting them know the fossils that we expected to have there.

(peaceful music) We just decided we were gonna just dig by hand and get as much as we could out there.

And that actually helped bring the community more awareness.

So we were actually able to get excavation equipment, and a lot of our just local people that know how to do that, have been volunteering their time, their machinery, all that kind of stuff.

(saw buzzing) Really, the substation being built is a catalyst for us to be there.

We knew about this for 20 years and hadn't been excavating because there really wasn't a reason.

So often, fossils are better protected in the ground and so we'd rather just leave them there if we don't have the right things in place to take care of them.

- [Volunteer] Yeah, right there, there's one.

(peaceful music continues) (hammer tapping) - [Diana] We've had over 500 applicants for volunteers to be coming at the site.

(machinery whirring) - [Liz] But after public outcry, the city decided to move the planned substation, preserving the dinosaur dig site for years to come.

- [Hunter] This large rock pile is where the substation will now be built.

And then, over here, this is the current quarry, which is where the substation was originally planned to be.

- It definitely feels like the community does care.

There are still a lot of people who understand the significance, and they wanna protect it.

It's a longstanding relationship and partnership.

(optimistic music) I'm excited that since we have the quarry for longer, we're actually opening it to the public to help us dig.

That's been a great program that we've just barely started.

- Wait, you weren't doing that before?

- No, nope.

So like we just like, well, part of it is it's way too hot in the summer to do it, right?

- [Liz] Oh, yeah.

- [Diana] So we've got it for the fall and the spring, and we'll just keep doing that.

But then, that brings more people through, and we lowered the age range so that eight-year-olds and older can come out.

That's like my favorite part of the day is hearing some little kids roaring.

(laughs) 'Cause it's like, it's definitely the really little ones.

And they, you know, they make the other animal noises, but it's the roaring for the dinosaurs.

It's great.

- [Liz] The echo of sound made by possibly the next generation of paleontologists.

- [Diana] There's the geology part that's learning about the rocks, but then there's the biology part that's learning about the animals.

A lot of the teeth that we've been finding on the site, we can take that and measure the enamel, and then get to the relative temperature of the water at that time.

So we can kinda track it through time, like a very fine detail of what was happening in the past that then tells us about today and what we're experiencing just change-wise on the planet.

I think that kinda cross-disciplinary way of looking at these ancient animals and things is helpful for a lot of kids that are like, "Oh, I don't wanna focus on just one thing.

I can focus on a lot of different things and kind of different aspects of it," which I think is really cool.

- [Liz] Including some aspects you have to see to believe.

- Our world-famous dinosaur butt print is over there in the corner.

(whimsical music) We don't usually think of dinosaurs as crouching down in the sand, but we actually have one that's crouching.

And what's really neat is we see little hand prints, and they're like this, they're curved.

So that's really interesting to me of just like this dinosaur was just sitting there, and it rested in the sand with its weird little hands.

And 'cause so many pictures you see their, their hands are just kinda like this, right?

And so we have evidence that their hands are actually like this.

And so I tell like kids, I was like, "It could pass you a basketball, but it can't bounce 'em."

So I think that's really interesting just thinking of one individual creature, like one little animal that was minding its own business, sat down in the sand, sat there for a little while.

You can kinda see that it shuffled a little bit, and then it stood up and walked away.

And we have that whole thing, like that whole event recorded in stone.

There's only maybe a dozen known in the world.

It's not something that we see dinosaurs doing a whole lot of.

- [Liz] People here in Utah are so active.

They're always riding bikes, climbing mountains, doing something, and now to learn like the dinosaurs were doing- - Doing the same thing.

- The same thing.

- Yeah, they weren't sitting in offices, and it's really hard to type when your hands only do this, so yeah.

(keyboard clacking) (dinosaur roaring) We can see how they walked.

We can see that they were running.

We can see that they were swimming.

We can see that they were sitting.

We can get some inferences about potential feeding behaviors and social behaviors from the tracks uh, that are very, very difficult to get from actual bones.

- [Diana] We just want people to dwell here longer, as well as I would love to see like spaces to like just lounge and hang out so that families just stay here longer.

And it becomes more of that community center where this is the place to just hang out, do some cool dinosaur things, and just come more frequently.

There's like this idea that we'll be here 50 years from now, right?

A hundred years from now, we can still be doing work and still have this be a center for the paleontology in this area.

(hopeful music) - Does it ever get old?

- Well, 200 million years old.

(both chuckling) - I set myself up with that one.

- I don't think it ever gets old, personally.

Because every time somebody discovers something, they're the first human to ever see it.

(hammer tapping) - [Diana] We just know that this site has so much to give us.

- I love that all these years later, dinosaurs are still a part of our conversations.

What fascinates you about dinosaurs?

What's your favorite one?

Please share in the comment section what gets you going about dinosaurs.

Also, check out another dino-infused story right here in the link, and be sure to hit subscribe and like, so you never miss out on a new "This is Utah" story.

(upbeat music) (regal music)