Stop and smell the dinosaurs

ST. GEORGE, Utah—Once upon a time not too long ago, there was a marvelous eye doctor who could see things so well that he ignored the lure of big money and opted instead for public service.

Dinosaurs never walked with humans. Or did they?

You see, one day in the year 2000, sometime shortly after his retirement, Dr. Sheldon Johnson had bought a farm out in Northern St. George, Utah, that he had planned to develop so he could live happily ever after. One day as Dr. Johnson was scraping off the upper 20 feet of dirt from his farm so that he could level the land and make it easily accessible to the new road that had been carved in next to it, one of the giant machines that was scraping away at the Earth happened to accidentally drop a giant slab of stone, which upended as it landed. When Dr. Johnson and the others looked at the stone, they thought they saw what looked like imprints of tracks of some strange type of creature that had been running in the mud.

“What’s all this?” Dr. Johnson wondered, scratching his head in the warm air and looking at the stone.

Dinosaur track reliefs at Johnson's Farm.

He and his crew of merry men tipped over more of the slabs and were amazed to see all kinds of things—large and small three-toed imprints, ripples like you’d find at the bottom of an ancient lake, and even long wispy scratches between small footprints, like the tail-drag marks that lizards make when they run through the desert today. Delighted at his wonderful find, Dr. Johnson stopped work on developing the land, and instead called in a bunch of archaeologists, paleontologists and geologists so they could have a look for themselves. What they ended up finding was literally a huge page of history that had been sandwiched within the rock layers beneath Johnson’s Farm.

Dating back 195 to 198 million years ago, Dr. Johnson’s land was the location of a huge shallow lake, where dinosaurs, ancient reptiles and primitive fish lived and played. These ancient creatures walked about, some on two legs, others on four, or swam in the shallow waters, leaving marks where their limbs sunk into the mud or scratched the lake bottom. Gradually these prints filled up with sand, and over time, the sand became compressed and it turned into sandstone as the Earth grew older and more sediments piled up on top.

The Moenave Formation: a busy dinosaur landscape

Johnson’s farm held what geologists call the Moenave Formation, a layering of sandstone, siltstone, mudstone and shale. The formation is sandwiched between the Upper Triassic Chinle Foundation and the Lower Jurassic Kayenta Formation, like the chapter of a book frozen forever in time. The bottoms of upper layers of the Moenave Formation formed reliefs of the footprints, like the ones found on the original slab of stone that was accidentally turned over during that fateful day on Johnson’s Farm a decade ago. The lower layers house the footprints themselves that were sunken into the primordial mud.

Scientists have found evidence of a giant meat-eating dinosaur known as the Eubrontes, which weighed close to a half a ton and walked on two legs. They also found evidence of the much-smaller Grallator, which hunted in packs. In addition, they found evidence of some alligator-like creatures, lizards, fresh-water animals, and ripples in the mud from the ancient sea.

Perhaps most wonderful of all, the scientists at Johnson’s Farm found some extremely rare tracks where the skin of these “terrible lizards” of old can be clearly seen imprinted in the mud, as well as swim tracks in the lake bottom that show clear evidence of some very large dinosaurs swimming!

Dinosaurs had lizard skin!

Johnson’s Farm is now open to the public, and a large army of volunteers continues to work the land in search of secrets. They find more each day.

Instead of letting his land turn into a Wal-Mart, which would have sold an array of cheap, Chinese-manufactured goods made from dinosaurs, Dr. Johnson kept his land so it could be enjoyed by Dinosaur lovers from all over the globe. In a way, that makes Dr. Johnson a dinosaur himself, because these days, most people would have chosen to ignore the existence of dinosaur tracks, and instead would have gleefully sold the land to the highest bidder. Because as we all know today, money is what makes kings and queens and all other people worthy of praise, not sentimentality or an appreciation of the past. 

Thank you, Dr. Sheldon Johnson, for being the most marvelous dinosaur of them all! May you live happily ever after.

See you on down the road!