Dinosaur Buried Alive By Collapsing Sand Dune

A plant-eating dinosaur might have been swallowed up by a collapsing sand dune some 185 million years ago in what are now Utah's red rocks.

A plant-eating dinosaur might have been swallowed up by a collapsing sand dune some 185 million years ago in what are now Utah's red rocks. The desert disaster likely plopped the dinosaur onto its head, where it remained until being discovered by a local historian and artist in 2004.

Joe Pachak was hiking in the Comb Ridge area near Bluff, Utah, when he spotted the bony fossil protruding from the multicolored cliffs of the Navajo Sandstone, which represents the remains of a huge sand dune desert as large as the modern-day Sahara Desert. As such, the dinosaur has been named Seitaad ruessi, derived from the Navajo word "Seit'aad," a sand-desert monster from the Navajo creation legend.

In 2005, museum paleontologists and crews excavated and collected the specimen, which included most bones of the skeleton, except for the head, and parts of the neck and tail. The missing parts were lost to erosion over the past thousand years, but were almost certainly visible when Native Americans lived on the cliff just above the skeleton, the researchers say.

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