St. George • Newfound excitement is greeting the age-old artifacts that have been unearthed recently from a prehistoric southern Utah fossil quarry that narrowly escaped being supplanted by an electric power substation.
On Thursday, St. George officials joined residents at the quarry to celebrate their decision to scrap construction of a substation atop the three-quarter-acre site, the sole Jurassic-period bone quarry in the American Southwest and one of the premier dinosaur track sites in North America, according to municipal paleontologist Andrew Milner.
Enamored by the paleontological gems scientists and volunteers were mining at the dig site, the city opted in late April to build the station south of the quarry, on municipal land across the street from St. George’s Dinosaur Discovery Site museum at 2180 E. Riverside Drive.
“We came up with a great compromise … [that] benefits not only city residents and our infrastructure, but the paleontologists who are passionate about finding these fossils,” St. George Mayor Michele Randall said at the event to extol the quarry’s survival and the fossils hurriedly extracted there during March and April before the city issued its last-minute reprieve.
It was left to Milner, lead paleontologist and curator of the museum who worked with city officials to find an alternate site, to catalog to the crowd at the event some of the groundbreaking finds among the over 1,100 fossils collected thus far by scientists and more than 500 volunteers from all over the nation and as far away as Italy.
Among the most notable finds Milner listed are prehistoric relics – bones, teeth, fish skeletons, among others – that appear to be from entirely new species previously unknown to science. Based on teeth found at the site, Milner said it looks like they have found two new species of large meat-eating dinosaurs and two small ones.
“This is from a meat-eating dinosaur that was probably 15 to 20 feet in length,” Milner said, holding up one of the teeth extracted from the rock at the quarry. “The tooth probably broke while it was still in its mouth and then wore down all the serrations on the edge and top of the tooth.”
In addition, one volunteer found a dinosaur footprint that was pulled out of a rock pile at the quarry. While bones at the quarry show what animals may have looked like, Milner said dinosaur tracks shed light on what the animals were doing when they were alive.
St. George’s Jurassic past
(Mark Eddington | The Salt Lake Tribune) Paleontologist Andrew Milner shows off a dinosaur tooth found embedded in a rock at a St. George dinosaur site, Wednesday, March 26, 2025. Volunteers are racing to extract fossils at the site before construction begins on a power substation.
Dinosaurs, he explained, began emerging as the dominant species about 200 million years ago during the start of the Jurassic period and end of the Triassic period, following a mass extinction that wiped out 75% of life on the planet. The fossils and dinosaur tracks once entombed in the quarry and adjacent 20 acres the city owns document the resurgence of life following that catastrophic event, according to Milner.
Other potential trailblazing finds include four possible new species of semionotid fish, a fish armored with enamel-like scales that dinosaurs savored and preyed upon. In addition, workers have unearthed at least two and possibly three new species of palaeoniscoids, an ancient ray-finned fish, two new species of Coelacanths, an ancient lobe-finned fish that grew up to six feet in length, and what looks to be three new species of sharks.
As strange as buried fish fossils and teeth surfacing in a parched desert might seem, Milner shores up such findings by the fact that the quarry was once bordered by Lake Whitmore, a massive 200 million-year-old body of water that covered everything from St. George to the Grand Canyon South Rim.
Keep on digging
(Mark Eddington | The Salt Lake Tribune) Idaho State University biology senior Cy Marchant examines a potential fish fossil at a St. George dinosaur site, Wednesday, March 26, 2025. Volunteers are racing to extract fossils at the site before construction begins on a power substation.
For St. George volunteer Jason Ludd, who logged more than 100 hours sifting through dirt and debris at the quarry, finding his first complete fish fossil was habit-forming.
“It’s borderline addictive because once you find one thing, you got to find them all,” the aspiring paleontologist said. “I guess that’s part of the reason why I kept coming out.”
By Milner’s reckoning, there are plenty more fossils, dinosaur footprints and other treasures waiting to be discovered. He estimates that workers have excavated less than half of the quarry. Now the site is no longer threatened by the electric substation, Milner said workers have the luxury of doing a more thorough and leisurely excavation of the area.
“We’re going to keep digging,” Milner said. “There are lots of discoveries waiting in the ground.”
Construction on the electric substation, which the mayor said will help bring power to 1,000 homes and 300 businesses, is expected to begin in October and take about three months to complete. St. George owns roughly 20 acres in the area, which includes the quarry, substation land and the museum.
