USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum

The USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum is one of the finest dinosaur museums in the American West, housed at Utah State University Eastern in downtown Price. The collection centres on specimens recovered from the remarkably productive fossil beds of the Colorado Plateau, and the depth of material here is genuinely impressive for a regional institution.

The star exhibit is the Utahraptor — a massive predatory dinosaur discovered in 1991 in the cliffs of eastern Utah and now understood to be the largest known member of the raptor family. The museum also holds a Camarasaurus (a long-necked sauropod), a Stegosaurus, and a substantial collection of Cretaceous fish and plant fossils. The fossil preparation lab is often visible through a window, allowing visitors to watch technicians working to free specimens from matrix. East Main Street; open Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is reasonable.

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A story
The Utahraptor — the inspiration for the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, though far larger — was discovered in the cliffs of eastern Utah in 1991. The USU Eastern museum holds specimens from this animal, which stood nearly two metres tall and weighed around 500 kilograms. The Jurassic Park film had already been written when the Utahraptor was found, but the filmmakers retroactively noted that the real animal matched their outsized dinosaurs better than the actual velociraptor ever had.