| Updated: 2:32 p.m.
It doesn’t look like much: A simple dirt road branching into a dusty basin, criss-crossed by tire tracks, ringed by an unimpressive ridgeline.
But when Jim Kirkland talks about what’s in that plateau and the surrounding Cedar Mountain formation, his eyes light up.
“This formation has more dinosaurs species than any other formation on the planet,” Kirkland, the Utah state paleontologist, told me last week as we walked along a rocky trail up to the rocky outcropping. “We’ve only known this recently.”
The same geology that makes the formations in Arches National Park possible has created a trove of Cretaceous era fossils, dating back 110 million years at the upper levels and going back millions more buried deep.