Throughout the year, and for three weeks each summer, museum staff, Webb students and volunteers hunt for fossils in the wilderness of California, Montana and Utah as they have done since the late 1930s.
In the summer of 2010, paleontologists from the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, along with student and volunteers from The Webb Schools, successfully extracted a juvenile dinosaur skeleton from Grand Staircase—Escalante National Monument (GSENM) in southern Utah. The remote location and relatively large size of the specimen required assistance from a helicopter!
The skeleton, which came from a plant-eating duck-billed (hadrosaur) dinosaur, was discovered in the summer of 2009 by Kevin Terris (WSC ’09). While a student, Terris was active in the paleontology program and part of the Alf Museum expedition to the Kaiparowits Formation of GSENM. Under permit from the Bureau of Land Management, the skeleton was excavated in 2010 and prepared for transport. Weighing in at nearly 1,000 pounds, the block simply couldn’t be carried out of the badlands. So, a helicopter was contracted to help remove the specimen for preparation and study.
After the successful extraction, the specimen was brought to the Alf Museum for research and display—and was recently flown to Japan to be part of a year-long traveling show on dinosaurs in that country.