It’s the time of the year for dinosaurs. As the weather warms and the days grow long, paleontologists strike out across the west in search of fossils ready to be exhumed from their Mesozoic tombs. I spend as much time as I can among the outcrops, too, and this year I’m especially excited about volunteering at an exceptionally-rich Allosaurus bonebed.

Eastern Utah’s Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry has yielded the remains of over 46 individual Allosaurus of various ages and sizes, not to mention bones from other dinosaurian contemporaries. But why Allosaurus should be so abundant in this one place is a mystery, and University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh paleontologist Joe Peterson has been returning to the site