Cleveland Lloyd Surroundings & History

Thirty miles south of Price, Utah, the quarry is in a semiarid area that is sparsely vegetated with piñon pine, Utah juniper, sagebrush, saltbrush, and cactus. The San Rafael Swell - a bulge in the earth that didn't quite break out into a mountain range - is the dominant land feature to the south.

The photo at right snows the view from atop Raptor Point, a high spot a few hundred meters west of the quarry. From that overlook, one can look out across 50 km of land and see high cliffs arranged in a great horseshoe to the east, north, and west. These cliffs are the abrupt edges of the Tavaputs Plateau to the east and north, and the Wasatch Plateau to the west.

Much closer to the quarry, country is rugged. Room-size boulders are strewn across the land just west of the visitor center. Ridges and steep-sided hills contain evidence that dinosaurs once walked here. Ranger guides lead the hardiest visitors on "track tours" to dinosaur footprints recorded in now-solid rock. Bones that haven't seen sunshine in over 140 million years peek from hillsides. Large and small hoodoos - eerie, human-looking landforms - dot the landscape along the way to the bones and tracks. Reddish barite roses - barium-rich mineral crystals in the shape of flowers - litter the ground in places, giving scientists clues to what the climate was like when Allosaurs prowled ancient floodplains (riverbanks).

Almost one hundred fifty million years ago, in Late Jurassic east-central Utah, in a lowland basin under a tropical sun, thousands of bones from dozens of dinosaurs collected in a deposit that today is known as the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry National Natural Landmark - or "the quarry," for short. A century ago, cowboys rounding up cattle in the area were amazed to be stumbling across black dinosaur bones instead of their livestock. But the Cleveland-Lloyd bone deposit wasn't brought to the attention of scientists until 1926 or 1927; the first scientific expedition to collect dinosaur bones here was put together by University of Utah geologists in 1928. They returned in 1929 for additional collection, but after that, the deposit was not studied again until 1939.

At that time, W. Lee Stokes, a native of Cleveland, Utah, was a graduate student in geology at Princeton University in New Jersey. Lee's family ran cattle near Cleveland, so - like many of the local people - he knew about the nearby deposit of dinosaur bones. Although dinosaurs had been recognized as a unique form of life over a hundred years earlier, there was still much that science did not know about them in Stokes's era. So he told his college professors about the place near his hometown where they could collect dinosaur bones to study. The professors thought that Stokes had a great idea. But since they had no money available to finance a research expedition, they encouraged Lee to focus on his studies at Princeton. Then Malcolm Lloyd, a Philadelphia lawyer and Princeton graduate, stepped forward with a donation of $10,000 to fund just such an expedition. The quarry received its name from a combination of the name of Stokes's hometown - Cleveland - and that of the financial supporter - Lloyd - who made the early excavations possible.

The summer of 1960 saw the beginnings of the University of Utah (U. of U.) Cooperative Dinosaur Dig at Cleveland-Lloyd for the purpose of establishing a research collection of Jurassic dinosaur bones. Gathering data included collecting dinosaur bones - and the U. of U. crew approached the Cleveland-Lloyd deposit quite enthusiastically! In fact, some 8,000 fossilized bones were carefully pulled from the bone bed over the first five years of the project.

In the photo at right, BLM Resource Explorer, geologist Mike Leschin, holds a chunk of femur (thighbone) from a dinosaur, probably a sauropod, or "longneck." This is one of the sights in store for those interested enough - and tough enough - to participate in a "track tour" to view dinosaur tracks.

As it turned out, most of those bones were identified as belonging to a species called Allosaurus fragilis, a carnivorous dinosaur. Much of what we know today about Allosaurus is derived from the bones taken from Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry during this 1960s dig.

As researchers dug into the bone bed, it became clear that not only was the site a phenomenal source of dinosaur bones, but it was very puzzling as well. Jim Madsen, an expert on the study of Allosaurus bones (osteology), has said, "It was as if someone had dumped a bunch of dinosaur skeletons into a mud pit and then taken a big stick and mixed them up all up." Hardly any of the bones are still articulated (joined together); in other words, with these Allosaurus skeletons, "the ankle bone is no longer connected to the leg bone, the leg bone is no longer connected to the thigh bone," and so on.

Several hypotheses to explain the origin of this deposit have been proposed. Some paleontologists thought the area might have been a muddy place where dinosaurs were trapped but the most recent study suggests that perhaps a watering-hole-in-a-drought scenario is the solution to the puzzle that is Cleveland-Lloyd.

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