SUU students took a trip to the Dinosaur Discovery Site on Saturday with Eric Roberts, assistant professor of geology.
The site is located in St. George and offers the students information about paleontology and prehistoric life.
The students are enrolled in classes including GEO 1020 — Dinosaurs & the History of Life, GEO 1220 — Historical Geology and GEO 3110 — Paleontology.
The students saw dinosaur and other prehistoric tracks, petrified wood and fossilized bones.
They learned information key to discovering the environment dinosaurs lived in, like the difference between mud cracks and roots: roots taper towards the tip and mud cracks taper downward.
They also learned about the different kinds of dinosaur tracks, such as Grallator, Eubrontes and Batrachopus tracks. The track names differ from the dinosaur names.
Most of the dinosaurs that roamed southern Utah were Theropods, three-toed dinosaurs.
Roberts said it is hard to say what the main dinosaurs were around the St. George area, but the most common may have been the Dilophosaurus, the Megapnosaurus and the Coelophysis at an older period.
Other findings at this site were flute and load casts. Flute casts are welts on the bottom surface of sandstone that show what direction water flowed.
Load casts are deformational structures that have irregularity of shape and lack of indication of water flow. Students also observed mud cracks.
At the site there were also tracks of horseshoe crabs, insects and cleft-footed clams, as well as fossils of burrows made by insects, mollusks or worms.
Kim Richards, a junior geology major from Vernal said she thought the most interesting part of the trip was the squatting dinosaur and the swim tracks.
The squatting dinosaur may have been a Dilophosaurus weighing around 1,000 pounds, measuring 6 feet high at the hip, and 18 feet long.
In the process of standing up, the squatting dinosaur shuffled his feet, leaving a second set of impressions or molds.
The classes learned that most of that era of dinosaurs lived around shallow waters, which made it easier to find tracks and molds left behind by them.
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