How Trump's cuts to public lands threaten future dinosaur discoveries
Tay Wiles
Tue 30 Jan 2018 05.00 EST Last modified on Tue 30 Jan 2018 09.03 EST
The paleontologist Rob Gay wasn’t expecting to find anything significant that day. He and a few of his students were scouting in the southeast Utah badlands in summer 2016 when they came across a hillside littered with hundreds of bones. Scattered haphazardly and protruding from the earth, they were the remains of of prehistoric reptiles that lived 220m years ago, at the same time as the earliest dinosaurs.
Gay has since made at least one discovery at the site that appears to be new to science. But now this dig, and others, is imperiled by Donald Trump’s move to slash protections for public land.
The site is located on the territory of the Bears Ears national monument, which Barack Obama created not long after Gay’s discovery in 2016, meaning the dig would be safe from new uranium-mining claims in the area. A year later, however, Donald Trump decided to shrink the monument by 85% in a bid to encourage more industrial use.
“There’s literally decades of work at this one site,” said Gay. “If the site was vandalized, disturbed, leased,” he said, it would be lost to the public.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/30/public-lands-dinosaurs-trump
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