How It All Began
In 2000, local optometrist Dr. Sheldon Johnson was leveling a hill on his property in St. George, Utah. As he removed the layers of sedimentary rock, he encountered a thick level of sandstone. As he tore it up in large blocks, a fantastic object was revealed: a three-dimensionally preserved dinosaur track. It was to be the first of thousands of tracks made by dinosaurs and other animals that have now been recognized or recovered from the numerous layers of sandstone and mudstone in the vicinity of St. George that formed almost 200 million years ago on the shores of an ancient lake.

Dr. Johnson realized that these tracks would be best served if preserved for educational and scientific purposes, and worked with the City of St. George to set aside the land and its fossils. The best preserved, and most numerous, of these tracks today form the floor and exhibits of the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm. Many other fossils, including bones of dinosaurs and fishes, shells of small aquatic animals, and leaves and seeds of plants, have joined the footprints to enable paleontologists to reconstruct the nearly 200 million year old ecosystem preserved here with unprecedented clarity, an extreme rarity for rocks of any time period!

Since the initial discovery, hundreds of thousands of visitors, including paleontologists from all over the world, have marveled at this unprecedented discovery. Dr. Jim Kirkland, State Paleontologist of Utah, described it as "the most significant dinosaur tracksite in western North America." Dr. Gerard Gierlinski of the Polish Geological Institute called the collection of tracks at the site "the most important in the world for researchers working on Early Jurassic footprints." Drs. Adrian Hunt and Spencer Lucas of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science referred to the site as one of only three known "Ichnolagerstätte" in the world, a place of exceptional fossil preservation in which levels of detail that do not ordinarily occur in fossils, including aspects of animal behavior, are preserved with exquisite precision.

To enable and encourage further educational and scientific use of these extraordinary discovers, the DinosaurAH!torium Foundation was established, and it needs your help to support, preserve, and exhibit these extremely rare fossil resources. Hundreds of fossils, including unique and very important specimens, remain unprotected outside the current building. Our educational programs are rapidly growing but need funding to expand. New track discoveries outside the building have yet to be scientifically documented.