Natural Features & Ecosystems

The Green River and Split Mountain (left), Camarasaurus skull in the Quarry Exhibit Hall (center), Steamboat Rock at Echo Park (right)

NPS

 

In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson established Dinosaur National Monument to preserve "an extraordinary deposit of Dinosaurian and other gigantic reptilian remains of the [Jurassic] period, which are of great interest and value …" Twenty-three years later, President Franklin Roosevelt added more than 200,000 acres to the monument to protect the river corridors and adjacent viewsheds for the major canyons of the Green and Yampa rivers.

Dinosaur NM is a land of ancient fossils, past environments preserved in rock, where two desert rivers flow across mountains and an arid landscape brims with life.