Paleontologist Robert Gay’s quest to find the fossilized remains of an ancient phytosaur, a primitive ancestor to crocodiles, turned into something much larger last summer when he came upon a major trove of Triassic fossils on public lands recently stripped from Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument.
But Gay’s find also is significant for other reasons that speak to the vulnerability of fossil deposits in Utah and elsewhere to looting and vandalism, especially those near roads like the site he dug with permission and funding from the Bureau of Land Management.
“This site [on the western side of the former monument] is pretty spectacular,” the scholar told The Salt Lake Tribune on Friday.