Free Moab talk explores diplodocus found under parking lot

A diplodocus skeleton pulled from under a parking lot at Dinosaur National Monument is heading to Moab for a free public talk, giving local travelers a chance to hear how one of the West’s most famous fossil landscapes still turns up surprises.

Paleontologist Rebecca Hunt-Foster will speak from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 29, at the Grand Center, 182 N 500 W, in Moab. The event is free and open to the public, and it is being organized by the Utah Friends of Paleontology’s Moab-based Gastonia Chapter.

The talk centers on a find that began on September 16, 2025, when asphalt removal near the Quarry Exhibit Hall exposed dinosaur-bearing sandstone at Dinosaur National Monument. The National Park Service says the fossils are most likely Diplodocus, a large long-necked sauropod that lived about 150 million years ago in the Late Jurassic Morrison ecosystem.

What makes the discovery stand out is not just the size of the animal, but where it turned up: beneath a parking lot at a place already known around the Four Corners for its bones. Park officials say roughly 3,000 pounds of fossils and rock were removed during excavation work that ran from mid-September to mid-October 2025. Park staff, a Utah Conservation Corps crew, volunteers and on-site construction crews all helped with the dig.

It was the first fossil excavation at that location since 1924. Earlier quarry work there ran from 1909 to 1922 under the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, then in 1923 with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and in 1924 with the University of Utah. Dinosaur National Monument itself was established in 1915, adding another layer to a site where park history and fossil history have long overlapped.

The bones are now being cleaned and studied at the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal, where the preparation work can be seen in the fossil lab. That local connection matters for anyone who drives through Jensen, camps near the monument, or stops at the Quarry Exhibit Hall, also known as the Wall of Bones. The hall sits over a preserved section of the historic Carnegie Quarry, where visitors can still see about 1,500 dinosaur fossils encased in rock.

For hikers, road-trippers and park regulars, the appeal is simple: the monument preserves fossils from about 150 million years ago, and Hunt-Foster’s presentation offers a chance to hear how that deep-time landscape still reveals new pieces of its story.