When I tell a new acquaintance that I live in Utah, I ‘m often met with a mild side eye. “Are you a Mormon?” is the question that always follows. No, I’m not, I explain, and I moved to the beehive state for a more unconventional reason. I came here for the dinosaurs.

The most famous of Utah’s fossil sites are Jurassic classics. Localities such as Dinosaur National Monument and the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry are rich boneyards from the heyday of Late Jurassic giants. But that’s just one relatively narrow slice of history in a state that offers so much undiscovered Mesozoic history. In 2010, the year before I moved to Utah, paleontologists named