Dinosaur National Monument Quarry Exhibit Hall

The wall of bones at Jensen

The Quarry Exhibit Hall on the Utah side of Dinosaur National Monument is a building wrapped around a single hillside of Morrison Formation rock that still holds roughly 1,500 dinosaur bones in place. Species visible on the wall include Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, and others from the Late Jurassic. An 80-foot mural and indoor exhibits explain the Morrison environment. At designated spots, visitors may touch real fossils on the order of 149 million years old; the main wall stays hands-off. Pets are not allowed inside. The hall is ADA accessible. Plan thirty minutes to a few hours depending on how long you stay with the wall and ranger talks.

Fossils are the Utah (Jensen) story. The Green and Yampa canyon overlooks are a separate drive from the Colorado entrance near Dinosaur, Colorado. Map apps that route to monument headquarters or Echo Park miss the quarry entirely.

Discovery, excavation, and the building

Paleontologist Earl Douglass, working for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, found the site on 17 August 1909: eight articulated Apatosaurus tail vertebrae eroding from a sandstone ledge north of Jensen. Local helper George Goodrich was on the crew. Excavations for the Carnegie Museum ran from 1909 into the early 1920s; Douglass oversaw work for about fifteen years. The team removed more than 300 tons of fossils, including multiple near-complete skeletons, numerous skulls, and taxa new to science. After Andrew Carnegie’s death, museum funding ended; other institutions finished visible extraction by 1924. Douglass pushed to leave remaining bones in place under a public shelter so people could see them where they lay.

President Woodrow Wilson established Dinosaur National Monument in October 1915 around the quarry and about eighty acres. The Works Progress Administration later cut a working space in front of the face. Active in-place preparation resumed in the 1950s; the Quarry Exhibit Hall opened in 1958 built into the hillside. For decades visitors watched preparators expose more bone on the wall. Active preparation of the wall wound down in the 1990s once NPS considered the display surface sufficiently revealed; maintenance continues. Today’s hall is Douglass’s idea executed mid-century: bones left in the rock, roofed for public viewing.

How access works day to day

Start at the Quarry Visitor Center, about a quarter mile from the exhibit hall, at the end of Utah Highway 149 off US-40 in Jensen (physical address commonly listed as 11625 E 1500 S, Jensen, UT). Dinosaur National Monument is a federal fee area — purchase or present a valid park or interagency pass. In summer, a shuttle typically runs between the visitor center and the hall every fifteen minutes; outside shuttle season, visitors drive the short road to the hall parking. Hours shift by season: summer opens earlier and closes later than spring and fall; winter hours are shorter. Both the visitor center and exhibit hall close on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. Confirm current hours on the NPS operating-hours page before you go, especially in winter.

Rangers answer questions in the hall and offer Junior Ranger and short talks in peak season. After the wall, Cub Creek Road leads to petroglyphs and the Josie Morris cabin for a longer Utah-side day. Green River and Split Mountain campgrounds are the nearby overnight options when open. The Colorado-side Canyon Visitor Center and Harpers Corner Road make a different itinerary — a second day if canyon scenery is the goal. Summer heat on the Uinta Basin flats is intense; the hall is climate-controlled. Winter can close or slow the shuttle and shorten hours, but the wall remains the monument’s signature paleontology stop year-round when the buildings are open.