I’ve never been as excited by fossilised monsters as I am by living creatures, says Ruaridh Nicoll in the FT, but my four-year-old son is crazy about dinosaurs. Not only can he tell an Opisthocoelicaudia from a Micropachycephalosaurus, he can actually pronounce their names. So I decided to take him on holiday to Utah. With an array of “major dino-sites”, this state is arguably the best place on Earth to entertain a “dinosaur-mad” child, and it has enough glorious wild places to keep most parents happy too. We flew in to Salt Lake City, in the north of the state, and drove three hours east to Vernal, which sits at the top of the Dinosaur Diamond – a roughly diamond-shaped, 486-mile highway loop that passes close to all the places we wanted to see.
In Salt Lake City, we visited the Natural History Museum of Utah, where Santiago was thrilled by some “Tyrannosaurus gnashers” and a whole herd of Allosaurus skeletons “bringing down a massive, similarly unfleshed Barosaurus”. And Vernal itself was fun, with big fibreglass dinosaurs in front of half of its cafés, petrol stations and hotels, including our own, the Dinosaur Inn & Suites. More thrilling, however, was the Dinosaur National Monument, a reserve 30 minutes’ drive away through the foothills of the Uinta Mountains, “a rubble world glistening with every mineral colour imaginable”. Here, in 1909, the palaeontologist Earl Douglass dug up more than 350 tonnes of fossils, including Diplodocus and Stegosaurus, but left many more: there is a covered gallery where 1,500 bones “still poke from the dirt”.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.