Home › Parks & Public Lands › National Monuments
Dinosaur National Monument
A fossil wall and river canyons on the Colorado-Utah line
Dinosaur National Monument straddles the border of Colorado and Utah, where the Green and Yampa rivers have cut deep, winding canyons through tilted layers of rock. Its centerpiece is a famous quarry wall on the Utah side, where some 1,500 dinosaur bones - Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, and the long-necked sauropods among them - lie exposed in the rock exactly where they were buried about 150 million years ago.
Protected in 1915 for that fossil bonanza and later enlarged to take in the spectacular river canyons, the monument was at the center of a landmark 1950s conservation battle when a proposed dam at Echo Park was defeated - a turning point that helped launch the modern environmental movement. Today it offers fossils, ancient petroglyphs, and some of the finest whitewater rafting in the West.