5 Places You Can Still See Dinosaur Fossils in the US

In 1909, paleontologist Earl Douglass unearthed the bones of an Apatosaurus, a type of long-necked dinosaur, at a quarry in Jensen, Utah. The site became known as Carnegie Quarry, after Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History, where Douglass worked. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson designated the area surrounding the quarry as Dinosaur National Monument. Later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt greatly expanded the size of the monument to cover more than 200,000 acres in Utah and Colorado.

Many of the monument’s dinosaur fossils date to around 150 million years ago, during the Late Jurassic Period. The most common types of dinosaurs found in the quarry are long-necked, plant-eating sauropods like the Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus and Barosaurus. Paleontologists have also found meat-eating theropods, including Allosaurus fragilis, and ornithischian dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus.

Visitors at Dinosaur National Monument can see a Camarasaurus skull and around 1,500 other dinosaur bones in the Quarry Exhibit Hall, where the bones are still embedded in the rock where paleontologists found them. Visitors can also spot unexcavated dinosaur bones outside by hiking the Fossil Discovery Trail.

“Most museums showcase dinosaur fossils as completed puzzles,” says Sonya Popelka, a park ranger and interpretive operations supervisor at Dinosaur National Monument, “but here you can see—and even touch—bones of several different species of Jurassic dinosaurs all jumbled up, waiting for your imagination to piece things together.”

Dinosaur Park in Laurel, Maryland, is an active dig site where visitors can see dinosaur fossils and learn about paleontology. The fossils at this outdoor site date to around 115 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous Period. The site has long been a source of dinosaur bones, leading Maryland to designate it as a park in 2009.

Dinosaur Park has yielded fossils from many dinosaurs, including Astrodon johnstoni, the state dinosaur of Maryland. In 2023, paleontologists at the park discovered a “bone bed,” a large collection of different bones in the same geologic layer. The standout fossil from the bone bed was a 3-foot-long shin bone from a theropod, a group of dinosaurs that includes the Tyrannosaurus rex. Paleontologists speculated that it might have belonged to an Acrocanthosaurus, a dinosaur that walked on two legs and was about 38 feet long.

The Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry in Emery County, Utah, contains one of the world’s densest collections of dinosaur fossils from the Jurassic Period (roughly 201 to 145 million years ago). Since the 1920s, excavations at the site have yielded over 12,000 dinosaur bones.

The Bureau of Land Management opened a visitor center at the quarry in 1968. In 2019, the United States established Jurassic National Monument to protect and provide access to the quarry. Visitors can see indoor exhibits featuring dinosaur bones discovered in the area and view fossilized sauropod footprints and bones along the Jurassic Journey hiking trail.

Curiously, roughly two-thirds of the dinosaur fossils discovered at the monument and quarry represent carnivorous predators like Allosaurus fragilis. “It’s very irregular,” says Jared Brogan, a park ranger at the Bureau of Land Management’s Price Field Office, which manages Jurassic National Monument. Normally, researchers would expect to see more evidence of the predators’ prey.

Dana Truman, assistant field office manager of resources at the Price Field Office, says the unusual concentration of predators in this small area “is one of the draws for the science to continue.”

In 1966, bulldozer operator Ed McCarthy unearthed several dinosaur tracks at a construction site in Rocky Hill, Connecticut. Later that year, the governor designated the site as Dinosaur State Park.

The park features over 750 dinosaur footprints from the Early Jurassic Period and over a thousand more that were reburied for preservation. Visitors can find these 200-million-year-old tracks inside a covered dome. Researchers still aren’t sure what dinosaur made these footprints, but they believe it might have been related to a predator called the Dilophosaurus.

In 1974, construction worker George Hanson was leveling a site in Hot Springs, South Dakota, for a housing development when he struck a mammoth tusk. With the help of his son, Hanson invited paleontologists to examine the site, which proved to have many more mammoth fossils—including a complete skull with the tusks still attached.

Instead of becoming a housing development, the land became a research area and museum called the Mammoth Site. Its indoor excavation site features huge mammoth fossils that are still embedded in the ground. Visitors can observe paleontologists working on the site and even get some hands-on excavation experience (for a fee).

Paleontologists have discovered more than 60 mammoths at the Mammoth Site. Most of them are Columbian mammoths, or Mammuthus columbi. Collectively, the fossils date to around 190,000 to 140,000 years ago.