Dinosaurs
A short distance north of Jensen on the Green River is a famous dinosaur quarry. Earl Douglass, a paleontologist who worked for the Carnegie Museum, first discovered dinosaur bones here in 1909. For several years Douglas and others excavated tons of dinosaur fossils and sent them to eastern museums.
The fossils lay embedded in the Morrison Formation of the Upper Jurassic Age, about 150 million years ago. Some of the dinosaurs whose bones lay here are Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Allosaurus, and Stegosaurus.
In 1915 President Woodrow Wilson created Dinosaur National Monument. Paleontologists still study and work at Dinosaur. And thousands of visitors tour the monument each year.
At Dinosaur Natl. Monument, you can walk right next to a cliff face, where dinosaur bones are embedded.
The Rock
Fantasy Canyon is a great place to view the unique landscape of Uintah County.
The Rich Indian & Settler History
Prehistoric Indian sites suggest that the Uinta Basin was inhabited thousands of years ago by Archaic and more recently by Fremont peoples. In historic times it was part of the Utes' domain. The first white men in the area were Fathers Dominguez and Escalante who traveled through the Uinta Basin in 1776 searching for a land route to Monterey, California. In his diary Escalante called the basin "a fine plain abounding in pasturage and fertile, arable land, provided it were irrigated." Nearly fifty years later American and French trappers found the Basin rich in beaver and other wildlife. In 1831-32 Antoine Robidoux, a French trapper licensed by the Mexican government (Utah was part of Mexico until 1848), built a small trading post near present-day Whiterocks where trappers could trade beaver pelts for supplies. The post was abandoned in 1844 because of difficulties with the Indians.
Store and Trading Post in 1905
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