Dinosaur flies after 156 million years

After 12 years of searching, Fran Barnes stood on a ledge, 250 feet above the canyon floor, staring at a 150-million-year-old petrified puzzle he had no way to move off the cliff. (See August 5 San Juan Record)
It took another 38 years for the answer to drop out of the sky. In October 2025, the roar of a helicopter’s rotors shattered the silence of the remote and nearly inaccessible site. 
Hovering above the vertical rock wall, the chopper lowered a long-line cargo net and effortlessly plucked 300-pound, plaster-armored blocks of dinosaur bone right off the ledge.
Strapped to the netting was the Explorers Club Flag #203, snapping violently in the rotor wash. The time for fulfilling John Newberry’s 1859 prophecy — that the monster would wait for someone with better tools — had finally arrived.
But that helicopter flight was just the victory lap. Earning the right to fly those bones out took years of planning, fundraising, swinging picks, and climbing fixed ropes. 
The modern assault on the “bad road” dinosaur began in September 1989, when State Paleontologist David Gillette joined Fran and Terby Barnes for a ten-day reconnaissance.
Scaling the cliff, they pulled a few weathered bone fragments and a single fossilized tooth from the sandstone — enough to satisfy themselves beyond a doubt that they had located Newberry’s original dinosaur, Dystrophaeus viaemalae — Latin for bad road, or difficult journey. 
But verifying the site was one thing; extracting a titan was another. The project lay dormant until 2014, when Dr. John Foster, then serving as Director of the Moab Museum and a fully credentialed paleontologist, wrestled with the permits, found the grant money, and understood the scientific weight of the beast sleeping in the rock.
He knew they were dealing with North America’s oldest known sauropod, but he also knew his small museum had neither the gear, the people, nor a place to store whatever they found on that rock ledge.
For that, Foster partnered with the Natural History Museum of Utah. Carrie Levitt-Bussian, NHMU’s Paleontology Collections Manager, joined the effort and led the brutal logistics of the dig.
While Foster guided the science, Carrie and her crew brought the rock-climbing equipment, the supplies, and the workforce required to safely pry the fragile fossils from their concrete-hard tomb and get them back to a lab without turning them into dust.
In the Summer of 2014, with climbing rope, harnesses, and hardware in hand, the field crew began the most athletic daily commute of their lives.
For the next decade, the crew lived out the literal translation of viaemalae — the “difficult journey” or “bad road”. Their daily trip to the job site was a grueling, one-hour vertical scramble up fixed ropes.
Unlike standard digs, where fossils are gently brushed from soft clay, this sandstone had cured over 156 million years into something as unyielding as highway concrete.
Had the beast that lay down on that site more than 150 million years ago known it would be “donating its body to science,” it could have looked for a less formidable place to die.
If you’re lucky, fieldwork in a dinosaur quarry can be a gentle process of clearing dirt to leave a fossil perched atop a neat pedestal of sediment. Still, the rock at the quarry had cured over 156 million years into something more unyielding than highway concrete.
The ancient bones were packed together in such a dense, chaotic jumble that there was simply no carving around them.
Instead, the team had to resort to “blind jacketing” in those early seasons, using heavy iron pry bars and wedges to break out massive, unyielding blocks of fossil-bearing cliff face, trusting that the stone held a prehistoric prize inside. 
Once freed, these blocks had to be armored on the spot to survive the long drop down. The crew worked frantically, slapping wet paper towels or toilet paper over the sandstone to act as a separator shield so the plaster wouldn’t bind onto the ancient bone.
They mixed Plaster of Paris in buckets until it resembled a thick milkshake, then soaked coarse strips of burlap in the brew and molded them tightly over the rock. 
Getting those 80 to 300-pound armored plaster field jackets to the canyon floor was a terrifying exercise in frontier physics.
Before they secured a helicopter, the crew lashed the heavy jackets to a search-and-rescue backboard tied to a furniture dolly, then manually belayed the precarious contraption down the cliff face at the end of a rope.
In July 2025, the crew arrived at the quarry to find a loose slab of sandstone big enough to make fossils out of them all, hanging precariously over the quarry.
A few days later, a sudden wildland fire erupted on the mesa above them. With no cell service on the ledge, the crew had no warning until a massive column of smoke rolled over the rim, turning the afternoon sky pitch black.
Choking on ash, the team made a frantic, silent retreat down the ropes, their phones finally screaming with evacuation alerts only after they hit the canyon floor. It was October 2025 when they returned for the final, victorious three-day push. 
Fortunately, the story of retrieving the oldest known sauropod in North America 150 years after it was found was compelling enough to win a grant from National Geographic to fund a helicopter.
They returned in October 2025 for one final, high-stakes three-day push to get the remaining bones out of the ground. In that exact moment, John Newberry’s 1859 prophecy was realized. 
Strapped to the helicopter’s cargo net was Explorers Club Flag #203.
Carrie Levitt-Bussian had carried that flag — one of only 222 in the world — on every climb up the cliff face.
Returning it to the club’s New York headquarters, she stood at the podium once occupied by such folks as Buzz Aldrin and Jane Goodall, regaling the crowd with the story of a dinosaur rescued from a sheer cliff in San Juan County.
Back in the Salt Lake City lab at NHMU, the painstaking work of preparing the fossils is ongoing, but so far has yielded a massive scientific payoff.
From the specimens recovered at the quarry known as the “Newberry/Barnes” quarry, scientists have come closer to assigning Dystrophaeus to its proper place in the sauropod family tree.
Modern dating technology from the quarry has set the age of the individual dinosaur at 156.1 million years, crowning it the oldest sauropod found to date in all of North America. 
So far, this is the only specimen of Dystrophaeus viaemalae recovered anywhere in the western hemisphere.
After 166 years, the West’s first dinosaur dig is officially complete, and the giant is finally home, and the difficult journey over a bad road has reached its end.
Special thanks to NHMU, the Moab Museum, and many more individuals, living and dead.
To learn more, visit: nhmu.utah.edu and type Dystrophaeus in the search field.