Seventy five million years ago, a long-necked creature resembling an oversized ostrich curled into a ball to die.
In June, the dinosaur’s still-curled body took flight over the barren, jagged rocks of southeastern Utah, suspended from the base of a double-rotored military helicopter usually used to airlift tanks.
It was the second helicopter called upon to pull the ornithomimid into the sky. First came a Black Hawk, which struggled to lift the nearly 5,000 pounds of rock and bones. When it failed, state officials sent the far more powerful Chinook, armed with a cadre of soldiers on loan from the National Guard.
Few could see the camouflaged helicopter carrying its bobbing white package for what it was: an animal that once lived among tyrannosaurs and hadrosaurs, set free. Its once marshy wetlands had long since been subsumed by the cliffs that Americans knew until very recently as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
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“Nearly all of the dinosaurs and other fossils preserved in the region have been found nowhere else,” said Joe Sertich, a paleontologist who has studied in Utah for more than a decade.
Dangling hundreds of feet in the air that summer day was a perfect capsule of that land before time.
Then, just a few weeks after the ornithomimid flew, President Donald Trump declared the dinosaur fossils of Grand Staircase-Escalante “common” and “not unique,” stripping protections from the place where this particular creature had slept for millenia.
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Trump shrank the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by more than 90% on July 13, removing almost 900,000 acres of geologic layers home to unusually complete dinosaur fossils.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and the entirety of the state’s congressional delegation stood behind him in the Oval Office as he signed the proclamation. They applauded, smiled and posed for photographs.
Back home, the scientists and paleontologists who have worked on that land for years sat in disbelief.
“It’s just an absolute distortion of reality to say that the fossils of Grand Staircase are common and can be found anywhere, and therefore don’t need any special consideration or protection,” said Alan Titus, who served as Grand Staircase-Escalante’s official monument paleontologist for the Bureau of Land Management until the fall of 2025.
“I so vehemently disagree with that perspective, and I can guarantee the people that wrote it did not talk to a qualified paleontologist about it,” Titus said.
Most of the region’s local leaders disagree with Titus. They love dinosaurs, they say, but the national monument has been a burden. Trump’s order was a long-fought victory, finally giving them more control over the future of both the land — and dinosaurs — they see as theirs.
“The fossils don’t disappear because the boundaries change. That basin is still one of the richest Late Cretaceous ecosystems ever discovered,” said Kaden Figgins, Garfield County’s planning and economic development director.
Figgins believes both that the dinosaurs are an extraordinary resource and that the dramatic cuts to the national monument are a boon for his community.
There are indisputable facts. The fossilized bodies found in Grand Staircase-Escalante are unique. They have inspired massive movie franchises and even amusement parks. The most recent “Jurassic World” featured dinosaurs only known to scientists because of excavations there. Dinosaur species have been found for the first time in this desert.
For the last 15 years, paleontologists and local leaders have been working in tandem to bring that Hollywood attention to their backyard. They want to make Utah a dinosaur capital and build a world-class dinosaur museum — an international destination for scientists and tourists alike.
Then there is the debate. Trump’s proclamation has brought to the surface in Utah a long-simmering and existential disagreement about the future of this land, what it holds and who should control it. The same people who for so long have been united in their belief that the dinosaurs are among the nation’s greatest crown jewels are now fundamentally at odds with each other over what is required to protect them.
In his order, the president did not just dismiss the value of the monument’s scientific resources. He went further, suggesting that the lands could be opened for mining minerals and coal, perhaps helping make the U.S. less dependent on foreign sources of critical minerals.
While the local leaders are excited about what comes with the shrinking of Grand Staircase-Escalante’s boundaries, the researchers are warning that its still-pristine time capsule could be disrupted by industrial development. The dinosaur bones themselves are at greater risk of being stolen and sold on the black market. And without the prestige of a national monument, money for research, a museum or scientific infrastructure will be far harder to secure, they said.
“There needs to be a national dialogue about public lands, and what we want to do with them,” Titus said. “Is this really what we want to do with our public lands? Open them all up to extraction? Or do we want to balance this with conservation, protection, and scientific research?”
Paleontologists believe that this remote corner of southern Utah could be home to the next great undiscovered dinosaur — and the next, and the one after that.
That faith is so strong that one local official is willing to break publicly with his leaders.
State Paleontologist James Kirkland found himself at a loss for words when first asked about Trump’s presidential proclamation. He said that Democrats have sometimes gone too far in their defense of Grand Staircase-Escalante’s massive size. But for the president to attack the monument’s boundaries wholesale? That’s a decision so far beyond his personal red line that he’s willing to risk the consequences of speaking out.
“Yeah we need common sense, but we don’t want to just throw out the baby with the bathwater,” he said. “It’s just sad. We had so much to offer, and this is not going to help anybody.”
“We are talking gigantic dinosaurs,” he went on. “This is the story, the age of dinosaurs in Utah. It could be ground shaking.”
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President Bill Clinton designated Grand Staircase-Escalante as a national monument in 1996. Ever since, researchers in Utah have been discovering new dinosaurs at such a rapid pace they haven’t been able to name them all.
And every year, they dig out at least one especially well-preserved dinosaur. Last year’s dig produced the ornithomimid that scientists airlifted out this summer. The year before it was a tyrannosaur.
“It’s just every year we get something special, like a little baby hadrosaur covered in skin impressions,” said Titus, who retired last year, taking the early resignation offer the Trump administration used to dramatically cut the size of the federal workforce. “It always has a treasure every year. And you don’t know what’s out there until you go out and look for it.”
Unlike many of the better-known dinosaur hotspots in China, and even in North America, Grand Staircase-Escalante is still in the early stages of investigation, paleontologists said.
Even researchers from China — often credited with the most interesting dinosaurs yet known to man — have come to see the fossils of Grand Staircase-Escalante.
“The Chinese admit we have the best Mesozoic age of dinosaurs record anywhere in the world,” Kirkland said.
Discoveries have come thick and fast in recent years only because researchers finally had access to modern tools and transportation. The region, known as the Kaiparowits Plateau, is so remote that it was the last part of the contiguous United States reached by cartographers.
The Chinook that carried the ornithomimid in June was merely the most recent helicopter deputized for dinosaur transport. The fossils are so massive that in previous years, paleontologists have paid federal wildland firefighting teams to swing by with their helicopters at the end of a deployment to pick up bones.
“We’ll fly a camp deep into the backcountry and camp out there for two or three weeks,” Sertich said.
Because the digs are especially expensive, funding them has become increasingly difficult as research dollars grow scarce. Paleontologists have relied heavily on the Grand Staircase-Escalante name to help get the limited dollars flowing over the last two decades, they said. Without that monument status to attract attention, they predicted that resources that were already hard to tap will likely grow dry.
“The new executive order cuts us off at the knees in that effort” to make Utah a new epicenter for dinosaur study and tourism, Titus said. The Interior Department has not hired anyone to replace him as the monument paleontologist at the Bureau of Land Management.
A BLM spokesperson told The Washington Sun that paleontological resources and protection “is not limited to areas with monument designation.”
“BLM Utah will move forward with advertising the position as opportunity and funds become available,” the spokesperson said.
The region’s local leaders share Titus’ passion for the dinosaurs. Several told The Sun that no other place on Earth can compete with what’s been found in their backyards.
One official went so far as to say that the county’s great exports are twofold: “our children and our dinosaurs.”
But they don’t have Titus’ fear for the future. In fact, these local leaders said that they don’t believe there’s any risk at all in cutting the monument.
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The contours of today’s fight trace back to at least 1976, when a group of power companies abandoned plans to build what at the time would have been the largest coal power plant in the country on the edge of the Kaiparowits Plateau. The plant would have been powered by coal blasted out of the same rocks that hold the fossils.
Back then, no one understood that there was an expansive dinosaur boneyard in those rocks. The plan fell apart because mining in the region was plagued with problems.
Mining the region was just as fraught in the 1990s, when another plan coalesced to build a coal mine in the middle of the plateau. But that time, the project died because Clinton established the national monument, effectively making it impossible to move forward. In the process, Utah Republicans grew increasingly angry with the federal government’s power over public lands; on the day of the monument designation ceremony, both Clinton and then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt were hung in effigy from lampposts in Escalante.
Exactly 30 years after they sent black balloons into the sky and told The New York Times that “We’ve had it up to here with the federal government,” Utah’s local Republicans have freed the land from the monument.
But now they face a new challenge. The intervening three decades’ worth of research have irrevocably altered understanding of what’s inside those rocks in Grand Staircase-Escalante. Even if mining the plateau today is economically justifiable and technically feasible — questions as yet unanswered — any new mining effort would have to confront what could be lying on top of a possible uranium deposit.
Federal laws like the National Paleontological Resource Preservation Act, which prohibits anyone from taking fossils with vertebrae from federal lands, will remain in effect. The Bureau of Land Management’s “legal responsibilities for paleontological resources did not change with the monument’s boundaries,” the BLM spokesperson said. “Vertebrate fossils are protected across all BLM‑administered lands, regardless of monument designation,”
But those laws are rarely enforced, Titus and Sertich said.
It is the land’s monument status, and the special protections that come with it — like the complete prohibition on taking anything out of the monument — that do far more to guarantee the safety of the dinosaurs in the long term, Sertich insisted.
Utah’s local leaders who advocated shrinking the monument say the dinosaurs aren’t at all at risk; if anything, they say, Trump’s order will boost their push for a regional museum.
“We hope it does bring attention to what’s there,” said Dave Dodds, the Garfield County public works director, arguing that shrinking the monument would lead to greater focus on what remains. “We hope that this can focus in on the dinosaurs down there.”
Garfield County Commissioner Jerry Taylor has been trying to get the museum off the ground for a long time; he had a feasibility study commissioned, he consulted experts who helped design North America’s most famous dinosaur museums, and he even recently persuaded the Utah State Legislature to provide a small amount of seed funding.
The presence of the monument has not helped advance those efforts, Dodds and Figgins said.
“We’ve never received federal funding for this, and we’ve been begging for 20 years,” Figgins said. “The museum does not exist because it was the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The museum exists because it’s one of the most significant dinosaur discovery regions in North America.”
The Bureau of Land Management said the government’s existing partnerships with universities and museums, and its work to “expand statewide capacity for preparation, curation, and research,” would be “unaffected by monument boundary changes.”
The government currently has partnerships with Utah State University Eastern’s Prehistoric Museum and the Natural History Museum of Utah.
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The most legendary dinosaur quarry in Grand Staircase-Escalante is called “Rainbows and Unicorns.”
It’s there that in 2014 Titus discovered a family of tyrannosaurs that drowned in a flood together, all of them unusually intact. Paleontologists are still studying these massive creatures, hoping to answer the many questions that arose from their discovery more than a decade ago: Were tyrannosaurs actually social creatures, traveling in groups with their relatives? Are these fossils an entirely new species of tyrannosaur?
Rainbows and Unicorns is the single fossil-rich area that Trump protected when he shrank the monument in July, calling it “a globally important paleontological resource.”
There was a deep irony in that for Sertich: The president kept protections for the one place where the most impressive fossils had already been found and largely removed from the site.
“Of course there are still bones in the ground, but you know the important stuff has already been excavated and removed, so now they’re preserving largely a hole in the ground,” he said.
There are hundreds of thousands of acres across the Kaiparowits Plateau with the potential for equally impressive finds, paleontologists said — and now they are no longer protected by monument status.
The researchers who have devoted their lives to this work have a nagging fear that if they don’t find and study these bones themselves, the fossils could end up one day on display in a private compound instead of a museum in Utah.
“We’ve cracked the door on the safe over the last 30 years, and now people want fossils for themselves. There’s a whole underground market for illegal fossils, and I see these things pop up on Instagram and eBay all the time. That’s going to become rampant,” Sertich said.
Enthusiasm for dinosaurs is exploding globally, with or without Utah riding along. A tyrannosaurus known as Gus sold for $50 million in an official auction in July, and the black market is growing quickly in response to the demand.
The Bureau of Land Management’s “law enforcement responsibilities remain in place,” the agency’s spokesperson said.
Titus has in the past been involved in efforts to prosecute the thieves. But in certain parts of the Western United States, black market collectors have grown systematic and organized in their dinosaur looting, Titus said.
That level of sophistication has not yet reached Grand Staircase-Escalante. Still, he wonders if that’s only a matter of time in a world increasingly obsessed with the best possible fossils.
“The bad guys know that now they can go out there and just pretend they are looking for clamshells,” he said.
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