By Timothy R. Olsen ’09, ’18 M.B.A.

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The project had bogged down, quite literally, as a patch of thick muck slowed the repairs.

It was the summer of 1988, and the Nielson Construction Company was working on the Huntington Reservoir Dam near Fairview when dozer driver Chris Nielson noticed something different in the quagmire amidst the logs and debris he was pulling out.

“He pulled out one of the bones, thought it was a log or something caught in his bucket, hopped out, realized it was a big bone, and called the Forest Service,” says Tim Riley, the curator of archaeology and director of the Prehistoric Museum at USU Eastern.

Over the next five days, thousands of people witnessed the whirlwind excavation, which was done extremely quickly to both preserve the bones and keep the dam construction project on pace.

This herculean effort was enormous not just in scale, but also because of the significance of the find itself. This Columbian Mammoth, with skin more similar to that of a modern-day elephant than its more famous wooly cousin, was, at the time, the highest elevation of any mammoth find — by a significant margin.

Most of the mammoth skeleton was recovered, but even more importantly, the remains were incredibly well-preserved. Researchers were even able to determine the old bull’s last meal, which included needles and twigs from a fir tree and sedge leaves and seed. However, due to that great state of preservation, there were also some immediate challenges to overcome.  

“They were able to actually look under a microscope and see the individual collagen proteins that are one of the main proteins in bones, and be like, ‘Wow, this guy’s amazingly well preserved,’” Riley explains. “But also, as they were uncovering him, he was falling apart. All as his bones were drying out and the cellular structures were crumbling.

“There was a whole second group behind the excavation team whose job was to keep the bones wet with blankets and towels and mop heads, things like that, and they got loaded up into kiddie pools in the back of trucks.”

Once the excavation was complete, though, things were just heating up for the museum. According to Riley, there were a few different local entities vying for the ability to house the mammoth, and the Forest Service basically said whoever can become accredited and meet the necessary standards would get the bones. Ultimately, that was the Prehistoric Museum.

And while the Huntington Mammoth may have been the catalyst for the modernization and accreditation of the museum, it’s certainly not the only thing it’s known for.

“When we have people come down and talk to us, they’re always fairly surprised — whether it’s the number of dinosaurs that were named by this institute, or whether it’s the perishable objects we have on the archeology side. … This museum, frankly, to toot our own horn a little bit, punches well above its weight.”

A Walk in the Park

The year 1993 features an all-time greats list of movies, including The Fugitive, Sleepless in Seattle, Mrs. Doubtfire, Aladdin, Cool Runnings, The Sandlot, Tombstone, Rudy, and Schindler’s List just to name a few. However, one film from that year stands out above the others. Following its release in June, Jurassic Park went on to become the highest-grossing film of all time — a title it would hold for four years until Titanic passed it in 1997.

And arguably the biggest stars of that show were dinosaurs that, prior to Jurassic Park, had been relatively unknown — Velociraptor. These dinosaurs were depicted as intelligent pack hunters that stood roughly 6 feet tall, were 10-12 feet in length, and had the ability to run as fast as a cheetah.

However, there was one major problem with this portrayal — Velociraptors had received a Hollywood glow-up. In actuality, the animals are roughly the size of a turkey.

Coincidentally and fortuitously, though, the same year the movie came out a new raptor species was named. Utahraptor more closely resembled its Hollywood counterpart — only bigger — and had been discovered right in our backyard just a couple years earlier.

“Even though the Velociraptor in the movie were way overblown compared to a normal, real-world Velociraptor, at the same time you’ve got the largest raptor dinosaur on the planet being named that would have been even bigger than the ones in the movies,” says Joshua Lively, the curator of paleontology at the Prehistoric Museum.

“To this day it’s still the biggest dromaeosaur known. It’s a very iconic animal and something that is very unique to Utah — it hasn’t been found anywhere else in the world — and having that first one to be discovered is a big deal for a small museum like us.”

That Utahraptor skeleton was the museum’s first holotype, a term used to describe the first specimen of a new species. It wasn’t the last, though, as the museum is now home to eight additional holotypes, including a quartet of ankylosaurs all collected within 150 miles of the museum.

Beyond the Big Names

And while Utah’s recently named hockey team and another installment in the Jurassic Park universe will no doubt keep the spotlight on the mammoth and Utahraptor, those exhibits are just a glimpse into the incredible collection housed in Price.

“Al,” a 28-foot long Allosaurus, was the museum’s first dinosaur skeleton and has been on display since 1963. Al’s bones came from the Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, home to the richest concentration of Allosaurus fossils in the world.

The Grand Country quarry, where Utahraptor was found, also provided the fossils for another holotype, Gastonia burgei, one of the previously mentioned members of the ankylosaur family.

Two more of the ankylosaur holotypes, Peloroplites cedrimontanus and Cedarpetla bilbeyhallorum — along with a sauropod femur that measures over 6 feet in length — came from another quarry near the museum just outside Wellington.

Lively notes that based on the femur’s size, the undescribed sauropod could have potentially been over 50 feet tall.

“There’s a local significance to this area. It’s right in our proverbial backyard and we’ve got amazing fossils that have been found in that particular site” Lively says.

However, as significant as the quarries are locally, both they and the fossils discovered within their bowels also garner national and international attention. Just a few months ago, in June of this year, the BBC and PBS featured Gastonia, Utahraptor, and Lively and his team in its Walking with Dinosaurs series. Episode 3, titled Band of Brothers, follows a group of Gastonia trying to survive Utahraptors in their path to adulthood.

Though Gastonia’s brain was roughly only the size of a chicken egg, its body was heavily protected, covered with defensive spines and spikes. In fact, the body armor on its pelvis was even fused together, forming a shield, though why exactly that shield developed is somewhat of a mystery.

Whether it’s a giant femur or bones from an armor-plated dinosaur, with the museum bringing in thousands of fossils per year, finding a home — not to mention the funds — to store everything can be a chore. But it also helps to keep the displays fresh. 

“One of the things we have to deal with in a collection space is how the heck do you store these massive bones? So, one of the first things we did after I got the job was get a grant to better house some of those fossils,” Lively says. “Folks think of museums as static, but they’re very dynamic.”

Not-So-Ancient History

While the last 10,000 years may seem like a long time, it’s just a blink of an eye when compared with the millions of years the dinosaurs roamed the earth and have since been gone from it. So, while there is plenty to see from the paleontological side of things, there is also a robust archeological side to the museum.

As Riley has moved more away from field work the past couple years and devoted more time to understanding what the museum has in its collections — much of which came from private assemblages with little information or background detail — that archeological side continues to grow.

One of the first items Riley started with a couple years ago is a complete Fremont bow. He initially had his doubts.

“I said, ‘That’s bogus. There’s no way we have a real 1,000-year-old bow that still has its cord wrapped around it and is effectively complete, right?’” Riley recalls. “So, I decided let’s date this. And it turns out it dates to about 900 years ago.”

And Riley didn’t stop there. The museum now knows it has in its collection the oldest-known (8,000 years) atlatl — essentially a lever used to throw a dart further — and one of the youngest-known (1,000 years) atlatls found in the Americas.

One of the most unique collections though — both in rarity and in story — is that of the Pilling Figurines. Discovered in the spring of 1950 in a small side canyon of Range Creek by Clarence Pilling of Price, these 11 small clay figurines, between 4 to 6 inches in height, are one of just two known complete sets.

The figurines, dated between 995-1,000 years old, are made of clay using a sunbaked process rather than being fired in an oven. They are placed on an upside-down woven basket to dry, and show both male and female figures, ornately decorated in the jewelry, clothing, and hairstyles of the time.

However, the set didn’t stay complete.

Sometime between September 1973 and January 1974, one of the figurines — No. 2 to be specific — went missing. And it stayed missing until November 2011 when then-USU Museum of Anthropology director, Bonnie Pitblado, received a mysterious package. Inside, wrapped in leather pouch inside a Crown Royale bag, and accompanied by an unsigned note, was the figurine.

The note read:

Sometime between 1978 and 1982 I came into possession of this piece by way of a vagabond acquaintance. He had told of “acquiring” it near Vernal, Utah. I have great interest and respect for this continent’s native culture and have always hoped to somehow return this to wherever it had come from. It has rarely been out of the soft leather covering I put around it and I have kept it in the condition in which I received it.

Recently in conversation I mentioned its existence to a friend and told of my desire to find its original home. They offered to help and were able to find that it may be the missing piece of the Pilling Figurine set. I am very excited at the prospect of it being returned to its proper place. Thanks to all who are involved in making this happen.

Naturally, extensive testing was needed to confirm the figurine’s authenticity. The first method was a visit to the foremost basketry expert in the American West, James Adovasio, to examine the drying marks imprinted in the clay on the back of the figurines by the traditional Fremont method. Adovasio cast the imprinted figurines in non-adhering cornstarch and examined the casts.

One of Adovasio’s most crucial findings was at least three sets of the male-female Pilling pairs were dried on their own, which left identical basket imprints on the pairs. One of those three pairs was the previously missing male figurine (No. 2) and female figurine No. 3.

Next, scanning electron microscopy was used to detect Alvar on the missing figurine. After the initial discovery in the 1950s, the figurines were coated with the substance, a polymer that’s no longer used, to protect them. The results of that test indicated the substance was indeed on the figurine, but they naturally wanted to be sure.

From there, X-ray fluorescence was the final method used to verify the authenticity of the returned figurine by comparing its elemental composition with others from the set. The results of this test, when combined with the previous two, was enough to conclude the mysteriously returned figurine was almost certainly the one that had disappeared decades prior.

Finally, after nearly 40 years, the set was complete again.

“We were cognizant from the outset that this artifact was so important — and the risk that it could be a replica too great — that we needed to identify and implement strategies to convincingly match the returned figurine to the original set,” wrote Pitblado in a 2013 paper for Advances in Archaeological Practice: A Journal of the Society for American Archaeology. Only then, we knew, could we confidently share the news that an object valued by so many through time had returned to the public domain.”

While the return of the Pilling figurine is an incredible story, there are hundreds of incredible objects with both cultural and historical significance housed within the walls of the Prehistoric Museum at USU Eastern. And each of those items has a story to tell.

“Being a museum person, we are telling stories. These objects are telling stories, and they’re resonating with people,” Riley says.